City Commission Hears Street Improvement Protests
In July, a street improvement district proposed to improve Eighth Ave NW from Old Red Trail north to 27th Street NW and 27th Street NW from Eighth Ave NW east to Highway 1806 was formally protested out by owners of 75% of properties in the district. This blocks the City from moving forward with the special assessment district.
However, City staff and officials have a few different options to make improvements possible:
- Seek additional cost share participation from NDDOT;
- Exchange this project for another project in the NDDOT Urban Road Program;
- Re-examine the district boundary; or
- Change the project scope to reduce costs.
No matter what, if special assessments are used to fund a portion of the project, a new district will have to be established with another protest period.
Protest letters indicated requests to include more properties, if not the entire city, in the district; and make the school district’s assessment higher because they felt the majority of traffic will be due to the schools. In June, letters were mailed to property owners in the district with estimated special assessment amounts. The school district was being assessed over $1 million and Walmart’s estimate was around $580,000 for this project.
The City of Mandan began applying for North Dakota Department of Transportation (NDDOT) funding for the corridor about 10 years ago.
Total project cost was anticipated to be $6.95 million. The City secured a $1.05 million grant from the NDDOT Urban Roadway Program; plus designated $394,000 from the water utility fund for the water main; $829,582 from the sales tax fund; and $347,210 from federal COVID-19 relief dollars to help with the project cost. The local share was estimated at $4.3 million.
Additional information on the project is available at cityofmandan.com/roadprojects.