Crumbling Infrastructure

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that we have major drainage, plumbing, road and sidewalk issues in Colonial Beach. The residents of CB have been demanding this issue be addressed for decades!

Please read my Blog to learn what people are saying.

Infrastructure in CB

Yard and street drainage, potholes, and low water pressure are high on colonial Beach residence list of things that need to be fixed. Like many other residents in town I have brought up these issues a number of times. We are told infrastructure is being addressed so why is a house that was built last year flooding their neighbor’s existing house? Why are potholes everywhere in town? Why are people continually complaining about their water pressure? Finally where in the heck is the nearly $3M a year in VDOT money going??

The Dewberry group has been assessing the situation for over 10 years so where are the results, why is there no action with the reports? I do not claim to be an expert on Colonial Beach infrastructure but what I do know is it can be fixed. How do you eat an elephant, one bite at a time. Why don’t we pick one street and actually fix it to show the people results. After that, let’s identify all of the worst areas put them on the priority list with a map and one at a time fix each of those.

One major complaint is potholes. I have not investigated this but one resident suggested there’s a company that could come in and patch all the potholes in a couple days in entire town. If this is true we should set aside some VDOT money and do that to reduce public outrage and improve the quality of our roads. Why are we paving little sections of streets at a time all over town and doing 20 to 50 to 100 foot pieces of road versus doing entire streets? This seems to be a very inefficient way to repair roads.

I personally would like to see a map with each road in town and an assessment of the issues and a plan to fix. I would also like to see cost included in that assessment. I’m sorry but a $1,250,000 walking path to Monroe‘s birthplace is not addressing the real infrastructure issues, it’s a fluffy project that takes funds away from fixing the real infrastructure issues. Speaking about maps, the infrastructure work during the past years has been on GIS mapping. Necessary work but enough? What good does it do the Town to invest all our money in a map and in the meantime not addressing any of the issues we have?

I ask the Mayor and Town Council to get serious, be fully transparent, and show the people real results.

Since infrastructure is a hot topic for this town we should have a webpage on the towns website that specifically shows everything going on with infrastructure. On the site I would also like to see all current projects, status and projected completion dates. Full transparency!!

Finally, let’s get the residents involved there are many that are passionate about infrastructure and having the problem fixed so let them be part of the solution!