BY SETH MANDEL
Staff Writer
MILLTOWN — The borough may soon step in on behalf of residents who are forced to pay for repairs to water or sewer pipes under their streets.
At Monday’s Borough Council meeting, Councilman Eric Steeber said that when those pipes break, it is the responsibility of the homeowner to fix them.
“Unfortunately, what it costs to have that concrete saw-cut, removed and the repair done, and have it properly closed up, can reach up to $8,000 or $9,000,” Steeber said. “It’s just a tremendous amount of money.”
He said many of the repairs, of which there are about a dozen each year, are needed underneath the older homes in the town. He said many of those homes are inhabited by senior citizens or younger residents who cannot afford to pay the exorbitant repair fees.
Also, many of the older roads were built with thick concrete, which is the reason the cost for repair is so high.
“When it’s regular blacktop, any contractor can come in, drag out the road, and do the repair,” Steeber said. “When you talk concrete a foot thick, you’ve got to come in with a big diamond-bit blade, you’ve got to cut the whole thing out, and do the repairs. It’s very, very costly.”
He suggested the council implement a program by which the municipality would contract the repair work and then let the residents pay the town back in increments.
“I don’t know if we could perhaps do a program similar to the sidewalk Shade Tree program that we do, where the town can take care of it and over three years the payments will be made back,” Steeber said. “Or, if the town wants to kick in and help subsidize the repair because of the financial impact on the homeowner. But let’s take a month to think about it and try to devise some thoughts on how maybe we can help.”
Steeber said that not only would such a program help the homeowners, but it would be beneficial to the borough as well.
He said residents cannot usually come up with the money for the repairs right away, leaving the problem unattended to for months at a time.
“If you have a water main break in the spring, that’ll go all winter until they can get the cash together,” Steeber said. “This way, the town can maybe step in, get the repair done, and say ‘OK, pay it over three years or five years, and if you don’t pay that, we put a lien on your house,’ similar to the sidewalk project.”
Councilman Sean Leary said that although the repairs are few in number, they can be “financially devastating” and are part of a larger problem.
“That’s an issue that has come up, and again it goes back to our pump station,” Leary said. “Although it was designed by a famous engineer, it happened about a hundred years ago.”
Also, Leary said, a water main break may be the homeowner’s financial responsibility, but if it isn’t repaired immediately, it will soon become the whole neighborhood’s problem.
He said if a burst pipe floods the road, it affects everybody on the block.
“So it’s a complex problem, and there should be some way to abate the impact to the homeowner,” he said.
Mayor Gloria Bradford said she hopes council members will have some possible solutions to present at the next agenda meeting of the Borough Council.