4 Months Late, Work On Washington Street Has Begun. But Is There A Contingency Plan?

Our friends at Colarusso just began their first portion of last year's biannual NY State DOT CHIPs-funded street repaving project.  I say last year because the repaving is typically done every odd-numbered year in the fall, and Robert Perry told the council early last fall that over $600,000 in CHIPs funds had been secured, Colarusso was the only bidder for the project and that they would begin work in November.  Well, better late than never, I guess.

The 500 block of Washington Street will be repaved, likely this coming week, and the work couldn't arrive too soon.  The street, from 6th to 5th, is a patched mess, not because it is worn from age but mostly because the street was ripped apart a few years ago to replace the water main below.  Also, the adjacent one block long Franklin Street is scheduled to be repaved.  The remainder of the project includes upper portions of Columbia Street and, I believe, the hill of Fairview Avenue between Green and Columbia Streets.

There are a few things to note about the work being done on Washington Street.

As well as repaving the streets, Colarusso must replace any corner curb ramps along those streets, making them ADA compliant.  Instead of starting that work on a Monday and finishing by Friday to reopen the sidewalks to pedestrians by the weekend, Colarusso began work on the 7 corners along Washington and Franklin Streets this past Wednesday.  It's now Sunday, Colarusso is nowhere in sight, and one must walk in the street to get from one end of Washington to the other.  One wonders if Robert Perry gave Colarusso the okay to start on a Wednesday to allow the sidewalks to be mostly unusable for the entire weekend.

On Thursday or Friday, Colarusso tore up the walking surface on the southeast corner of 5th & Washington, removing several large flagstones in the process.  Those flagstones, as well as the dozens of others surrounding the house at that corner, were installed last year while the house was being renovated.  Colarusso will be replacing the stones they removed with concrete, which the homeowner should have installed on their sidewalks in the first place.  According to the city code, concrete is the only acceptable sidewalk surface -- anything else is a code violation.  Our Code Enforcment Office somehow allowed 94 N. 5th Street to cover their long sidewalks in flagstones (a process that took months), even after issuing the contractor a building permit.

Will Colarusso eventually remove the unwanted flagstones?
Don't count on it.

From what I have seen, Hudson's CHIPs repaving projects do not include replacement of curbs. It will be interesting to see if the crumbling, ancient, loose, leaning, missing and dangerous curbs on Washinton Street (particularly along both sides of the eastern half of the street) are replaced or just left alone to continue to deteriorate. It seems to me that if the city is going to replace a street and expect it to last -- and look decent! -- for decades, then ugly and crumbling curbs should inluded in the project. (In case you hadn't noticed, Hudson has a sidewalk problem and a curb problem.)  If it means finding other sources of money to include curb replacement, then replace them at the same time the streets are redone!  Curbs are an integral part of the health, longevity and look of our streets.  A new street with a broken or missing curb is evidence of a short-sighted and flawed approach to our streets, and leaving the responsibility of replacing curbs to property owner is a losing game that the city should end.

With the present CHIPs project underway, it might be a good time to remind readers of perhaps our DPW Superintendent's biggest and most expensive mistake.  Or, possibly, one big lie.

According to Robert Perry's own explanation at a Common Council meeting early in 2022, Colarusso repaved the two blocks of South 3rd Street in 2017 even though it was determined at the outset that "most of the foundation of the street had some issues."  In other words, the foundation of the street, located up to two feet below the pavement, was in need of replacement.  But due to a lack of "time and materials," Perry decided that Colarusso needed to stick to the plan of repaving the street rather than performing a complete and much more expensive and time-consuming street reconstruction.  So, as per the scope of the project, new asphalt was laid over the bad foundation at the cost to the State of New York of over $200,000.  Colarusso, a professional "heavy highway contractor," knowingly paved over a faulty foundation below two blocks of our truck route.  Mr. Perry was okay with it, as was Colarusso.  It's kind of a difficult notion to swallow, isn't it?

Within 5 years DPW was forced to deal with the failing surface of the street on their own, beginning the process of tearing up the street to replace Colarusso's asphalt and the "foundation with issues" they ignored or were told to ignore.  Portions of the street were reconstructed by DPW in 2022 and 2023 at local taxpayer expense, but that work is far from complete.  Plenty of the two blocks of the major artery in and out of the city are a bumpy, cracked, failing, ugly mess with a bad foundation, just 6-plus years after Colarusso repaved the street. 

Today, six and a half years after Colarusso's 
repaving job on South 3rd

DPW will be forced to replace this and 
 other failing sections soon enough.  Just like
last year and the year before.

If what Mr. Perry told the council was the truth, one wonders if he regrets having told Colarusso to pave over that bad foundation that we are still paying to replace and is taking up DPW time and effort.  And one can't help but wonder if Colarusso begins tearing up Washington Street next week and notices that the foundation of that street should be replaced, would Mr. Perry once again tell them to not worry about the foundation, to just replace the top layer of asphalt as planned, call it a day and hope for the best?  

Do you suppose that Mr. Perry would keep the secret to himself, like he did in 2017, that the foundation of Washington Street is not holding up and that it should have been replaced, but "because we hadn't planned on doing a full reconstruction," Colarusso didn't do one?  In other words, would Mr. Perry make the same unwise decision that he supposedly made in 2017 if the same situation were to arise this year, perhaps on Washington Street next week?  Or on Columbia Street?  Does Mr. Perry have a plan B in case Colarusso discovers that the foundations of any of our streets being repaved this year need to be completely removed and replaced?  Or will our $115,000 DPW Superintendent once again put off the street reconstruction for his DPW to handle it sometime down the road and for Hudson taxpayers to pay for it?

Unless a council member asks him about this (HA!), how would we ever know?

For more information about the ongoing South 3rd Street situation, read here: Fiasco