Phone updates, portable wireless service and golf-cart rides make best of bad situation
By Steve Plunkett
Weekly updates online for the Core district’s 20-month road, water main and drainage project were not enough. Now Gulf Stream has become a concierge, giving almost-daily reports — by phone — to affected residents.
“We started kind of on a weekly basis, but as it turns out even a week is too long,” Town Manager Greg Dunham told town commissioners on Sept. 13. “So we have meetings over at the public works building at 8 o’clock in the morning with the contractors, myself and (Public Works Director Anthony Beltran), and that is so we can report back to (Town Clerk Renee Basel) what is actually happening on that one day because things change almost on a daily basis.”
Residents are also ferried by golf cart between their homes and Town Hall when they park there to avoid the construction on their streets.
“I know I’ve personally taken some people that were walking and with the golf cart just picked them up,” Dunham said.
The coordination is not always smooth. Basel alerted Commissioner Joan Orthwein and her neighbors on Palm Way “that certain things were going to be occurring on that day and they didn’t happen,” Dunham said. “So we had residents who had moved their cars including Mrs. Orthwein and there was no need for them to do it.”
Orthwein is the canary in the construction coal mine, making sure fellow commissioners are well aware of the problems Core residents face.
“I just want everyone to realize how bad this is,” she said.
Wright Way and Old School Road were the first streets that contractor Roadway Construction LLC began tearing up in late April. Since then, Orthwein has missed a delivery of a rug and chairs and had her weekly pool and lawn service crews turned away.
The overall construction project particularly affects “finger” streets that lead off Polo Drive to dead ends at the Intracoastal Waterway. The streets will be closed to traffic for three roughly two-week periods with indefinite waits in between. The first period is for installing new water mains, the second is to install new drainage and the third is laying asphalt.
Basel calls each homeowner to say what to expect.
“I had one guy today; he has a dog walker. He’s not here but he has a dog walker so he needs to get to his house. So he’s going to park here (at Town Hall). I got his dog walker’s name, he’s going to park here, we’re going to take him over to the house so he can walk the dog.”
The town also has obtained portable wireless devices that residents can pick up at Town Hall if their internet line is cut during construction. Each device can provide 5G speeds to up to 32 other devices.
“You’ll be able to take care of homework or business work or watch TV or whatever you need to do,” Police Chief Richard Jones said.
The accommodations for residents pleased Mayor Scott Morgan. “That’s as good as we can do, it seems to me,” he said.
Dunham said construction crews were installing water services and drainage on Polo Drive in mid-September and should be finished with the first lift of asphalt on Wright Way and Old School in early October.
“I think they’re about caught up with the time that they lost (waiting for a state permit) because they pulled in three and four crews. So that wasn’t the original plan for them to be working in so many different locations. I think they’re doing a good job,” Dunham said.
Commissioners decided at the meeting to continue to let lawn and pool service and delivery teams operate until 6 p.m. weekdays after the Roadway crews leave, usually around 4 or 4:30, on streets with active construction. The additional services can also be scheduled for Saturdays until the roadwork is completed, again only for affected homes.
“I just want to try to keep everyone as happy as we can. That’s all,” Orthwein said.
Commissioners also authorized buying a $17,604 golf cart, the last big purchase of fiscal year 2024, which ended Sept. 30.
The four-place cart has rear seats that face forward, is American-made and comes with a solid warranty “rather than buying something that was kind of a Chinese knockoff,” said Jones, who researched the purchase.
The cart was a necessary expense, Dunham said.
“We have only two golf carts. One of them probably by the end of this construction period will need to go out in that pile of trash that’s created by the work itself,” he said.
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