By Jim Bloch
St. Clair city council member Micah Volz is frustrated about the delays in the project to build a sidewalk leading to St. Clair High along Cox Road, which borders the east side of building.
This fall, St. Clair High will become the joint home of high school students and middle school students. The school has seen a new gym, new classroom and a slew of other improvements as part of a $112 million millage proposal approved by voters in 2020 to ready the campus for the transition. St. Clair Middle School on Yankee Road is becoming an elementary school and its students – sixth, seventh and eighth graders – will be heading to the expanded high school.
That means an additional 600 or so students will be making their way to combined school, many of them on foot.
Nothing new there: For more than 60 years, students have walked west on the Clinton Avenue sidewalk to SCHS. With no sidewalks, they have also walked along the dirt shoulders and skirted the ditches of Cox Road, often in the dark of winter mornings, as vehicles barreled past them trying not to be late for class or work.
The school was built in 1960.
Cox Road runs for about three-quarters of a mile between Clinton Avenue, on which the high school sits, and Vine Street to the north. A trailer park and houses line the road; three streets from two subdivisions empty onto Cox.
Now-departed City Superintendent Quentin Bishop repeatedly assured council members and residents that the sidewalk would be completed this summer, before the start of school.
“They will mobilize and be putting staking in near the end of June or in July and they will have construction completed before school starts,” said Bishop at the regular council meeting June 2.
It turns out that construction will not start until October.
Ryan Kern, a project manager for AEW, Inc., reported to the city council at its regular meeting June 16 that the project would be delayed because of a potential threat to bats living in the area.
“It’s looking like it’s going to be a fall construction by the time we get the bids back from the Michigan Department of Transportation,” said Kern, as heard on the recording of the meeting posted on YouTube. “As part of the environmental documents, they noted that
(because of) potential bat habitats … tree-clearing and brush clearing cannot take place until October at the earliest. It can only take place between Oct. 1 and April 14 … There’s likely no bats there, but unfortunately there’s very strict environmental regulations.”
Council member Micah Volz, who is also the director of bands at the high school, requested the update from Kern. After the meeting, Volz expressed his disappointment on Facebook.
“Writing to share my frustration with the Cox Rd. sidewalk project timelines,” wrote Volz. “This project has received significant funding through a TAP grant. All winter we have heard that we would break ground in the Spring. When Spring arrived, delays arrived before the excavators…each month another delay…another review before we could begin. Last night at our final City Council meeting of June we were told that a final state/federal environmental review was taking place, but construction would begin in October because of bat habitats. I’m incredibly frustrated because this review is protecting bats before it is protecting kids walking to school.”
Kern discussed the delays.
“We’re going through MDOT in order to get the approval of the plans, the specs, the environmental documents,” said Kern. “There’s a lot of supplemental documentation that goes along with that. We’ve had the plans and specs done and ready to go for some time now. We’ve been going back and forth with MDOT about comments. But we’ve had those addressed for a while now, and we’ve been trying to get the environmental documents approved on that.”
Clarifications from MDOT, which normally happen quickly, sometimes took as long as a month.
“That has set us back,” Kern said.
The city won a grant from the Michigan Department of Transportation for a Transportation Alternative Program to build the sidewalk along the west side of Cox Road. TAP grants fund “multi-use paths, streetscapes, and historical preservation of transportation facilities that enhance Michigan’s intermodal transportation system and provide safe alternative transportation options.”
The grant will pay for nearly 80 percent of the project, estimated to cost $295,300. The East China School District, St. Clair Township and the St. Clair County Road Commission are participating financially in the project, along with the city, sharing the $63,060 match.
“The project has slowed but my conviction to see it through has not,” said Volz. “This project needs to happen for the safety of all the kids walking to the St Clair Secondary 6-12 Campus.”
Jim Bloch is a freelance writer based in St. Clair, Michigan. Contact him at bloch.jim@gmail.com.
