Pa. residents opposed to loss of brick roads

PITTSBURGH (AP) - Jim Jordan said he searched an extra year for a house so he could buy on one of Mt. Lebanon’s brick-paved streets.

About 10 miles of Mt. Lebanon streets are paved with brick instead of asphalt, but road reconstruction and stormwater projects are threatening to replace what residents like Jordan are calling an addition to their property values and an historic asset to the community.

“I’d expect my taxes to be adjusted if the brick is replaced,” Jordan told the board of commissioners.

Commissioners ran into the problem of what to do with brick streets when awarding a contract last week for stormwater and sewer projects in the area of Mapleton Avenue. Now, officials plan to reexamine their policy for replacing brick with asphalt.

The bids for the Mapleton project contained multiple options that would have retained or replaced the brick along Rae Avenue, but the commission majority chose the cheaper option to replace it with asphalt.

The total contract for sewer work and road reconstruction was $2.63 million, but it would have been $2.97 million to resurface Rae Avenue with new brick or $3.02 million to clean and replace the existing bricks, Manager Steve Feller said.

Commissioner Dave Brumfield said the added expense of keeping brick when reconstructing streets could set back other road projects in the municipal budget.

“We see no reason the municipality should downgrade us,” said David Radin, another Rae Avenue resident upset by the bricks’ pending replacement. Officials said they don’t have records showing when the streets were built or last repaired.

Commissioner John Bendel was the sole dissenting vote on the contract, not because he opposed the sewer work, but because he would have preferred to keep the bricks.

“The brick streets, they give our neighborhoods character, and preserving them is key to preserving the historical nature of those neighborhoods,” Bendel said.

Bendel said the commission would work to develop a general policy for examining the replacement or repair of brick streets, looking at the upfront costs compared to the long-term ones. If brick generally lasts longer than asphalt before needing to be resurfaced, the higher cost of installing brick might be outweighed by its lower maintenance, Bendel said.

PennDOT is planning to reconstruct Castle Shannon Boulevard, another brick-paved street, and initially intended to replace it with asphalt next year. But the Mt. Lebanon Historic Preservation Board is asking the state agency to consider ways to save the brick, said Susan Morgans, spokeswoman for the municipality and staff liaison to the board.

Mt. Lebanon’s engineer, Dan Deiseroth, said brick streets make up about 12 percent of Mt. Lebanon’s roads by mileage, but would cost nearly twice as much to rebuild and preserve compared to replacing them with asphalt.

Spending more on brick potentially would reduce the amount of reconstruction the municipality is able to do each year to keep its roads in shape, he said.

Other communities with large numbers of brick streets are in a similar spot. Coraopolis Manager Ray McCutcheon said any time his borough has a large utility project or road reconstruction that requires tearing up brick, leaders have replaced it with asphalt, or, in high-traffic areas, concrete.

“A lot of people like the bricks, but they’re just so old and worn,” McCutcheon said. “It’s just too expensive.”

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Information from: Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, https://pghtrib.com