As the oldest water main lines are situated beneath the square in Downtown Monmouth, replacing them and complete reconstruction of the roadway makes for a major project, which Mayor Rod Davies is hopeful this will begin next year:
“What we’re going to do is use some of our ARPA money that we received, and we hope to get the engineering underway to replace all of the water mains around our Public Square. Again, that is some of the oldest in town; some of it is 100 years old. We’ve got a big X underneath the city square. In fact there’s two main water mains that are directly under the fountain and we hope we can design this new project downtown there to make sure that we have enough water pressure at all the buildings to run their sprinkler systems and we’re hoping to eliminate that X underneath the public square, so that we don’t have a disaster under the fountain one of these days that we have to figure out how to bypass or repair. That’s going to be certainly the beginning of next year, that’s going to be one we’re going to tackle.”
Furthermore, City Administrator Lew Steinbrecher report the downtown water main and road reconstruction project will coincide with a downtown streetscape beautification improvement, addressing parking concerns and the flow of traffic around the square by moving from two lanes to one lane:
“Primarily on South Main Street, that’s where we seem to see the most volume in parking and in business activity. Pre-COVID, we were actually looking very closely at transcending from parallel parking to angled parking, but we know that the businesses down there are interested in increasing the number of on street parking and we take that seriously. We do have to take a look at what happens in the one hundred block in all four directions because there is some parking in that one hundred block and we will need to taper down the square into just one lane. If we go from two lanes to one lane, we have to use the one hundred block to taper the traffic.”
This downtown project is expected to begin in 2023.
**Written by WMOI/WRAM Director of Communications Kelsey Crain**
