Otsego residents and other M-89 drivers will have a little kink in their plans this week as the highway will close from Monday, May 2, to Thursday, May 5 for sewer work.
City manager Thad Beard said the connection of a property owner’s sewer line to the city’s sewer main had failed.
Because of the location of the failure, the whole road has to be closed and torn up.
Beard said, “It’s just Murphy’s Law that it fails in the middle of the road, not up by the home.”
In that part of M-89, the sewer main runs right down the middle of the street.
Beard said, “We had the same thing in the 300 block, but we could move the traffic into the turn lane, since it was closer to the side.
“Now, we’ll be occupying the whole street.”
Beard said the project would hopefully take only the four days planned.
“There’s about 12 inches of concrete below the asphalt that we have to cut through,” he said. “It’ll be a dirty job, in more ways than one.”
The city, he said, would be splitting the cost with property owners, but the breakdown couldn’t be determined yet.
Beard also said the city would try to get the Michigan Department of Transportation to extend its planned summer paving project just a little further past Kalamazoo Street to encompass the torn up area. The work will also replace other laterals in the area while everything is torn up.
The detour will be posted just as the city does for the Creative Arts Festival every fall, Kalamazoo Street to Franklin Street, but M-89 will be open to all businesses on either side of the break, just closed to through traffic.
Contact Dan Pepper at dpepper@allegannews.com or at (269) 673-5534 or (269) 685-9571
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