OP-ED: Jackson Road Project Points to Problems At MDOT’s Regional Office
by Stephen Lange Ranzini
SINCE I LIVE downtown immediately next to the newly constructed section of Huron between Ashley and Main, I have carefully observed the management of the Jackson Road reconstruction project and want to express my strong support for the many public comments criticizing MDOT’s Brighton Office’s leadership and management of this process.
The problems popped up from the very beginning of the public engagement process prior to the start of the project when the decision was made by MDOT, Mayor Hieftje and the Ann Arbor City Council to cram an inappropriate four-lane to three-lane “road diet” conversion on Jackson Road, a road too busy for a “road diet” even according to MDOT’s own research, since the road averages much over 15,500 trips a day and MDOT’s research indicates that “road diets” cause traffic jams when serving more than 10,000 cars a day or peak rates over 1,000 cars per hour. [http://michigan.gov/documents/mdot/MDOT_Research_Report_RC1555_376149_7.pdf]
When many citizens complained, MDOT offered a citizen participation meeting, then purposefully limited attendance by the public at the meeting by putting electronic signs for the meeting only on Maple Road near the event itself, not on Huron where the impacted drivers travel!
Because the Jackson Road resurfacing project is far behind schedule and the Huron Street portion of the road resurfacing downtown was delayed many weeks, many tens of thousands of commuters have suffered inconvenience. Through interaction with and direct observation of the MDOT Brighton Office leadership team I have concluded that:
1) The Management will blatantly lie to members of the public. When the MDOT crew building the road started construction one Saturday morning at 6:45am, I asked the supervisor on site if he was aware of Ann Arbor’s noise ordinance [Please add hyperlink: https://library.municode.com/HTML/11782/level3/TITIXPORE_CH119NOCO_ARTINHINO.html] that prohibits construction noise before 7am or after 8pm Monday through Saturday? He replied that he was aware of the law, and that the city had granted MDOT permission to start early. Our city manager confirmed to me later that the city never granted any such permission. The head of the regional office for MDOT, Mr. Sweeney, later related to me a very different tale from this MDOT supervisor.
2) The Management team will flagrantly ignore local laws to do what they want to do when they want to do it. After assurances from Mr. Sweeney that the MDOT crew would follow the Ann Arbor noise ordinance in the future, the MDOT crew worked another night past 11 p.m. paving the road. When questioned, Mr. Sweeney defended their action and there was no consequence for the staff involved. The road then sat with no work for four days and on the fifth day, MDOT finally painted lines on the road and removed the orange barrels. For six days prior to the day the block was paved no work of any type occurred on the road at all. If you were one of the people who travel that road during rush hour, you might wonder why you were inconvenienced for so long and leads to my third conclusion.
3) The construction scheduling is incompetent, since I have observed on several occasions that the work stops and the work is untouched for multiple days on end without any progress, even when the weather is perfect. It took many weeks for MDOT to finish the repaving of one city block, Huron Street downtown between Ashley and Main Street. Around the corner, the city excavated and completely reconstructed a block of Ashley Street in three days, including a complete reconstruction of the sewer system under the street. As a result, tens of thousands of daily travelers were inconvenienced with orange barrels on Huron Street downtown for weeks on end.
4) When these concerns are brought to the regional MDOT manager’s attention, Mr. Sweeney, he politely dismisses them, and defends his staff, rather than digging into and solving the root causes.
It seems entirely possible to me based on my experiences with the MDOT led project on Jackson and Huron Streets, that their lack of professionalism and lack of competence contribute to the sorry state of the roads owned by the State of Michigan in Washtenaw County. I call on our Governor to shake up the management team at our MDOT regional office to achieve better results in the future.
Stephen Lange Ranzini is a resident of downtown Ann Arbor and CEO of Ann Arbor-based University Bank. You may contact him at ranzini@university-bank.com
I like this idea of the $500 tax credit. The tv commercials with Snyder talking about the road to recovery is just too ironic for words. After years of neglect Ann Arbor’s roads are a disaster. How hard is it to fix the roads? That the gang in Lansing went on break without a plan to fund road repair is just another in a long line of screw ups that state residents pay for a a variety of ways.
I would like to suggest that every registered vehicle in the state of Michigan get a $500.00 tax credit for having to drive on Michigan Roads. We are paying high insurance rates, and lack of road repairs would justify this. When they finally get around to getting the repairs done, we have to deal with all routes coming and going for weeks of slow work ethics