CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — One small stretch of roadway is starting to turn into a nearly $2 million job for the City of Corpus Christi.
Gaines Street runs between Robert Drive and Airline Road. On one side of the roadway is a neighborhood, on the other is Seaside Cemetery -- the final resting place of Selena Quintanilla.
Gaines was one of many infamous pothole filled streets around town. It also contained a number of large dips in the road. Initially, Gaines Street was set to be a simple street rehabilitation project. However, problems started to appear.
"Originally that project was not. That roadway was not picked to replace any of the utilities on there because we're not doing reconstruction, we're only doing rehabilitation," said Corpus Christi Public Works Director Ernesto De La Garza.
What city crews noticed was that the drainage was not good along the street. The curbs were sinking down into the ground.
"So what happened is we had to go back and fix the drainage issues," he said. "We couldn't do it for the reclamation process. We had to use the reconstruction process, which is get the material, put it in a truck, haul it off and bring in brand new material."
That helped to turn a $1.5 million project into a nearly $2 million overhaul of the street. Also driving up the cost, was the city's new policy of going ahead and checking the underground utilities closely, even though there was no planned work to be done.
"If we do all of that extensive work to the street, we bring a new select material, new overlay surface on, only to find out a few days later or a few weeks later that there's a leak, either a water leak or a sewer leak, maybe a gas leak ,we don't wanna have to go back in there and cut the street and then you're back to patches everywhere," said Corpus Christi City Manager Peter Zanoni.
Zanoni said a large section of the sewer pipe under Gaines Street was close to failure, and is going to be replaced.