Lauren Broddrick, a resident of Buda’s Bonita Vista subdivision, displays one of the places where Casa Loma Street has eroded. (Photo by Wes Ferguson)
By WES FERGUSON
The four-year-old streets in Lauren Broddrick’s neighborhood don’t have potholes, she said. They have valleys. Instead of buckles and cracks, there are canyons and cliffs.
“Here’s a crack my whole foot can fit in,” she said.
Broddrick was standing in the middle of Casa Loma Street in Buda, and to demonstrate, she lowered her shoe into the gap. It had started as a hairline a few years back and never stopped widening, she said.
“You can’t cross the street at night,” Broddrick said. If you try to drive on it, she added, “You can easily bottom out in some places if you’re not paying attention. You have to weave all across the road.”
For nearly two years, the city of Buda has been locked in a legal dispute with a contractor who was paid more than $700,000 to demolish and rebuild the streets in 2007. But with no resolution in sight, Bonita Vista residents are beginning to voice their frustration.
“They’re a mess. They’re just a mess,” said Broddrick’s neighbor, Deniese Campbell. “I don’t know why the litigation is taking so long.”
Indeed, the lawsuit has been on hold since February 2010, two months after the city of Buda filed the suit against contractor Austin Bridge and Road in December 2009, according to district clerk records.
Buda’s attorney, George Hyde, said a report by a third-party engineer showed the streets had not been built to the contract’s specifications, and the city had entered negotiations this summer with the expectation that Austin Bridge would provide a “reasonable resolution” to the dispute.
“Those negotiations did not bear fruit, and so we are in the process of unfortunately now having to go through the legal processes to get the roads paid for,” Hyde said. “I know the city feels very bad for the people living out there that have to deal with the defects in this almost brand-new road, and we were trying to not spend money on litigation to try to find ways to have those issues resolved collaboratively, but that has not been successful.”
The parent company of Austin Bridge and Road, Austin Industries, did not respond to a request for comment. Hyde said the city would seek a summary judgment against the Dallas-based company.
The roads are in such poor condition they will have to be demolished and rebuilt, he said. In the meantime, city engineer Stanley Fees said he and fellow staff members would discuss options for a short-term repair of Bonita Vista’s streets.
“I need to gather the troops and put our heads together on this,” he said. “We don’t want to go out and spend a few hundred thousand dollars on a temporary deal and have to go and rip it up later.”
