News

By Steve Plunkett

    Gulf Stream will wait at least 18 months to repave six streets in its core area after the paving contractor realized there was almost twice as much work to do.
    In February, paving firm Anzco Inc. of Boca Raton estimated the needed repairs — on Banyan and Old School roads; Polo and Lakeview drives; and Wright and Oleander ways — would cost $170,550. But company representatives returned in October to remeasure the job site and discovered their error.
    “On the original proposal the total was approximately 7,400 square yards,” Town Manager Greg Dunham said. “The correct total square yardage of roadways, included in Anzco’s original proposal, is actually approximately 14,050 square yards.”
    As a result, the proposed price for the repaving “will increase significantly,” to $294,392, up about 74 percent, Dunham told town commissioners.
    Mayor Scott Morgan was not pleased. “It seems odd to me that Anzco would make such an egregious error in its calculations,” he said.
    Commissioners had tentatively approved a contract with Anzco for the road work last April.
    Dunham urged them at the Nov. 9 commission meeting to postpone the project, partly because there was not enough money set aside in Gulf Stream’s budget but more so because the town just hired engineers to develop a 10-year plan for capital improvements. The long-range plan may call for digging into roadways to work on water pipes, he said.
    Commissioners were quickly swayed by his arguments.
    “You don’t want to put in new roads and then cut them up,” Commissioner Joan Orthwein said.
    Vice Mayor Thomas Stanley said the commission probably will not review the capital improvement plan and reauthorize the paving before July 2019.
    “I think that would be kind of the general scope,” he said.
    In other business, commissioners heard a plea by resident Barbara Sloan in favor of smaller for-sale signs on homes.
    “I’m here to beg essentially that the ordinance regarding real estate signs be changed and to use the same signs that are in Palm Beach, Manalapan and Ocean Ridge,” said Sloan, who lives in the Bermuda House condominiums.
    “The signs are tiny little signs. I don’t think that the size of those small signs has hurt the real estate transactions or the prices in those towns. And I think that when you drive through Gulf Stream and see the signs that look like billboards frankly, that are in my estimation very bad.”