CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Annaville Baptist Church officials said they were shocked to find out the city wanted them to pay a whole lot of money on a simple street cut for a utility project they were working on.
Nat Simmons is the associate pastor at the Annaville Baptist Church. He has been constantly meeting with contractors over the $7 million worth of expansion projects going on here.
Part of that construction work calls for running new water and wastewater lines under Cliff Crenshaw Street and connecting them to the city pipes.
"What the city was requiring us to do was to not just fix the portion where we cut into the road to tie into the sewer line, but they wanted us to pave the whole road from Butler to Brindle," Simmons said.
He said that it's been difficult working with the city on permitting this project and then to run into the repaving demand, it was just too much.
"It was probably re-paved a year ago but they wanted us to take all that up for a simple tie-in which was going to cost just thousands and thousands of dollars," Simmons said.
Public Works Director, Ernie De La Garza, said the city is working on a new street cut ordinance. It's aim is to ensure that utility work on our new streets is done properly and the street is re-paved so that drivers won't notice a thing.
"In the ordinance it says we have the ability to go block to block and curb to curb, and as you just mentioned, that could be tens of thousands of dollars," De La Garza said.
But De La Garza told 3NEWS that since they applied for the permit before the new ordinance took effect, the church won't have to pay tens of thousands of dollars after all.
"They have to replace anywhere from 10 to 15 feet in either direction of the trench so that it's a good repair and then when someone passes by you don't get that bump in the road," De La Garza said.
And now that this bump in the road for this construction project has been smoothed over the church can move forward with its expansion.
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