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After a hard rain, Ed Jorgensen gets dead birds washing up into his yard.
"Hundreds of cigarette butts, too," said Jorgensen, who lives along the 200 block of East Main Street in Brownstown.
He's been there for 12 years; runoff has always been a problem. Storm drains are too few and inadequate. Photos taken after a downpour last year show a huge pool of water in his front yard, stretching into the street itself. Vehicles splash the water right onto a neighbor's front porch — sometimes right under the front door.
"It's bad," Jorgensen said. And soon, he fears, it could get worse.
Beginning Aug. 9, PennDOT will begin work on portions of East Main Street. The road, said PennDOT spokesman Greg Penny, is in terrible shape; so PennDOT "squeezed" some money from its maintenance budget and will seal the road and apply a thin coat of blacktop.
"It's a minimal job," Penny said.
But officials in West Earl Township, which includes Brownstown, say it could cause maximum headaches.
For years, township officials have wanted to fix stormwater problems along Main Street. But money, said township Supervisor John Ford, has been hard to come by. West Earl has applied for several state and federal grants, even stimulus money — to no avail. And so while they acknowledge that PennDOT has a duty to maintain the road, doing so "will exacerbate the problem," Ford said, by sealing it and causing even more water to run off.
Supervisors have asked PennDOT to postpone the paving project, but Ford admits, "from their perspective, I don't know how they could postpone it. If they say, 'OK, when?' we can't tell them, 'Two years from Sunday.' Because it could cost $2 million — and of that, we have zero.
"All the money they're putting into this may alleviate a safety issue," Ford said, "but it might be better to say, here's some money [the township] could use to fix" the underlying problem.
It doesn't quite work that way.
Main Street in Brownstown is a state-owned road; PennDOT is responsible for it.
But stormwater drainage systems in curbed sections of state highways are the responsibility of local municipalities. And the problem, said West Earl Township Public Works Director Jim Houser, is that along portions of Main Street in Brownstown, there is no functioning drainage system.
"There are only two catch basins down on the lowest part of [East Main Street] to take the water away," he said. "All this water comes out of the Redwood development and just goes down onto East Main Street, just a huge amount of storm water."
Partly due to the water problems, curbing has crumbled along the road. Sidewalks are in poor shape, "but this is not the economy for us to go tell residents to fix their sidewalks," Houser said.
Officials have been talking about what they call the "Main Street Project" for years. Trouble is, Ford said, the problem is so advanced that it will cost millions to fix.
Curbing needs to be restored; culverts must be reconstructed. "It will be a couple hundred thousand [dollars] for design work and engineering alone" Ford said. "And we've come up dry."
The project is not listed on the county's draft 2011-2014 Transportation Improvement Program, which prioritizes maintenance and funding. Township officials hoped they might qualify for federal stimulus funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, but couldn't. State matching grants were sought, to no avail.
"PennDOT tells us we're responsible for storm-water management, and I agree," public works Director Houser said. "But if we can't get the funding, what are we supposed to do?"
The township has an annual budget of about $2 million.
But PennDOT officials say while they can sympathize, their primary charge is to take care of the state-owned road.
"We're at the point where we need to go in and do something just to preserve this road," Penny said. "We've already been there many times doing crack sealing, but it gets to be a safety issue" as water seeps into the roadway and undermines it.
So the agency was able to come up with enough funding to "pave a leveling course" (which involved applying a 3/4-inch layer of blacktop to seal and level the road) from Route 272 to just west of Buchland Road.
At some point, Penny said, PennDOT will need to come in and do a more thorough job, "and it will be a costly project — we'll have to mill it up, sidewalks will need to be done, curbing needs to be done and we'll have to do ADA ramps" for those with disabilities, he said.
"I know it's a challenge for a lot of municipalities" to pay for improvement projects, Penny said. Some older Pennsylvania boroughs are in particularly dire straits; he cited Halifax Borough in Dauphin County, where PennDOT held back on maintenance to the point that "there was a mound in the road — it got so uneven." Finally the borough got a grant to address its drainage problems, Penny said, and the road could be fixed.
Jorgensen, who worries that he'll soon be fishing even more dead birds and cigarette butts out of his yard if the road is sealed, wonders why PennDOT couldn't put West Main Street on the back burner, too.
"I don't see where it needs to be done right now," he said. "They've got to get it fixed first."
Gil Smart is associate editor of the Sunday News. E-mail him at gsmart@lnpnews.com, or phone 291-8817.
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