Lapeer seeks grant to rebuild Genesee Street

LAPEER — Lapeer County has been slowly repaving old M-21, which goes by multiple names as it snakes its way across the county, but that work has highlighted how truly awful the road is in the section known as East Genesee Street.

City Manager Dale Kerbyson told city commission members Monday night that his office has filed for a U.S. Dept. of Transportation TIGER (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) Grant to reconstruct East Genesee Street between M-24 and Saginaw Street.

Last year U.S. DOT awarded $526.944 million in Tiger grants and while this year’s Congressional authorization has dropped that to $500 million,

Kerbyson told commission members at a meeting Monday evening. “It’s the first light in the end of the tunnel for fixing that road.”

Still, the grant is far from a done deal. Last year U.S. DOT funded 46 capital projects in 33 states and Puerto Rico.

Kerbyson said the application is “in its infancy” with the city sending U.S. DOT a notice of intent to file an application.

A U.S. DOT spokesman called the process a “highly competitive process,” aimed at projects “that have a significant impact on the nation, a region or a metropolitan area.”

Noting that 6 million people use that stretch of street annually, Kerbyson said he hopes to rally community support behind the grant application.

If the grant’s approved, the city, said Kerbyson, will invest more than $1 million in repaving Genesee from M-24 to Saginaw Street and replacing the utilities beneath it.

In other transportation news, Kerbyson said the city has applied to MDOT for an enhancement grant to put a tunnel underneath M-24, just north of the railroad crossing, to allow for safer pedestrian crossing.

If approved, that work will be completed during 2013 when MDOT rebuilds M-24 through the city. Kerbyson said he’s confident the project can be done, since there is already an abandoned nine-foot deep stem tunnel running down the center of the road between the railroad tracks and Genesee Street.