ST. LOUIS — Mayor Tishaura O. Jones said Thursday that long-awaited, large-scale improvements to major city streets are still on schedule to be completed in the next couple of years. But she indicated they may require more money.
“There’s never enough money to do everything we want to do when it comes to our streets,†she said.
City officials have set aside more than $60 million in city money and federal pandemic aid to overhaul the roads: They plan to repave major thoroughfares like Kingshighway, Jefferson Avenue and Grand Boulevard. ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ want to install traffic circles and bumped-out curbs on those roads, and others, to slow down speeders and cut down on deadly collisions that have reached alarming levels in the past few years.
People are also reading…
Residents have indicated strong support for the effort: When aldermen asked the public what to do with the city’s portion of the NFL Rams relocation settlement, making streets safer finished second in the voting, behind fixing water mains. When Jones announced her re-election bid to supporters in May, her promise that street work would begin later this year drew some of the loudest applause of the event.
Now, after years of waiting for design work to be completed, dirt is set to start moving in the coming months.
Still, in a news conference Thursday, Jones suggested costs might rise.
The projects, she said, would be “on-time and hopefully on budget, barring inflation and other unforeseen circumstances.â€
City officials have been warned about potential overruns before. Rich Bradley, the president of the city’s Board of Public Service, told aldermen in November that the cost of asphalt and petroleum was way up and similar road projects were running anywhere from 40%-50% over budget.
View life in St. Louis through the Post-Dispatch photographers' lenses. Edited by Jenna Jones.
