One day everything is normal–and the next, you are being charged $42,656.25 to rebuild the road you live on.
Homeowners got their first notice of the project earlier this year.
“They literally gave people here three months notice that they were going to have to pay tens of thousands of dollars at the end of summer,” said Lisa Sabin-Wilson, a homeowner on Hillcrest Drive in Green Bay.
Many of the houses on Hillcrest Drive are rural-residential, meaning there is a lot of space.
Much of it uninhabitable marshes, but it is along the road, they own it, and it costs $75 a foot.
“This road is trafficked by 800 to 1,000 vehicles a day,” she said. “There are ten people that live on this road. People who utilize this road should share equally in the cost to develop it.”
The work is scheduled to finish in August, and that is when everyone has a choice: pay up now or finance it for five years at nearly 5 percent interest.
If city hall votes to cancel the project due to backlash, Alderman Jesse Brunette says the road would be allowed to fall into disrepair, with no improvements for 15 years.
This means that hazards like potholes could be ignored.
“I would absolutely do that right now and fill every one of those potholes by hand,” said Sabin-Wilson.
She says if the project is canceled, maybe the situation will be different the next time the city talks about Hillcrest Drive.
“We don’t care if it gets reconstructed,” she said. “We don’t care if it gets thrown to the bottom of the list. 15 years, fine. Maybe by then, Green Bay will have a decent wheel tax and we won’t have to pay for it at all.”
The project will come to a final vote at Green Bay’s city council meeting tomorrow evening at 7pm.
