Year-long closure approved for downtown roads, sidewalks
Road and sidewalk closures will start Tuesday for another set of streets in downtown Columbia.
The Columbia City Council approved it Monday night, as Sixth and Elm, LLC and Catalyst Design Works get set to build a multi-story, 261-bed apartment complex at the old Bengals Bar & Grill and Casablancas restaurant spot on Elm Street. The complex will be the fourth Brookside apartment complex in the downtown area, set to open in fall 2017, with parking for residents built into it.
Starting Tuesday morning, crews will close the sidewalk on the north side of Elm Street between Fifth and Sixth Streets, and portions of those two streets’ sidewalks for the next year. Elm Street will close on September 1, according to a letter from Catalyst Design to the city, and will open to eastbound traffic on January 1, 2017. Fifth and Sixth Streets will have partially closed or narrowed lanes in that time, as construction crews complete utility work in the area, like widening sidewalks, lowering the sewer line and totally replacing a stormwater culvert.
Mayor Brian Treece said he was disappointed city staff had not moved faster on a policy to charge developers for closing roads and sidewalks. The downtown area, in particular, has seen several busy intersections closed due to construction of large housing developments, and Treece said he has heard from several people about frustrations in navigating the maze of orange signs and blocked roads. Treece also introduced a “fee schedule” for developers seeking to close a road or sidewalk – 20 cents for every linear foot of sidewalk and 30 cents for a linear foot of road closed, for every day it stays closed. This money could be used for capital improvement projects, which primarily are road and sidewalk repairs or improvements.
Jack Cardetti, spokesman for Sixth and Elm, LLC, said he and the developers agreed in a fee schedule. It may cost them more in the long term, Cardetti said, but he understood the inconvenience such closures put on people in Columbia. However, he disagreed with the idea that the city council charge them in this case, if approved, since the project was so far along in its planning.
“Those [fees] ought to be prospective,” Cardetti told the council. “We ought to know that when we’re designing these projects, we ought to know that up front, we ought to be able to calculate that, we ought to be able to put that information into our projects.”
Cardetti said their work will also include replacing a deteriorated stormwater pipe on Elm Street, and widen the sidewalks to ten feet with tree grates. The newest Brookside just opened up this month at Ninth and Elm, with Shakespeare’s Pizza serving as the ground floor tenant. Cardetti told ABC 17 News they are looking for businesses to fill the two other spaces on the street level. He added that the Sixth and Elm project is the last Brookside development planned for the near future.
The council discussed the fee schedule as part of the FY 2017 budget. It held its first of three public hearings on the budget, with a work session planned for Saturday at 9 a.m.
