News Photo by Steve Schulwitz Miller Street in Alpena, seen in this Thursday photo from the intersection with Merchant Street, is going to receive a compete reconstruction beginning Monday. There will also be new water and sewer system upgrades done, as well as new curbs and gutters.

ALPENA — A major street, water and sewer project begins Monday on Alpena’s north side and it may disrupt traffic flow and parking on one of the city’s busiest streets.

The city’s engineering department has a plan in place, however, that it hopes will limit inconveniences for residents in the area of the construction.

A full reconstruction of Miller Street is slated to begin and, while the roads are torn up, water and sewer infrastructure is also going to be replaced. The project will run from Second Avenue to Walnut Street. Once completed, the project will also include new curbs and gutters on the shoulders of the street.

City Engineer Rich Sullenger said the city has done its best to maintain Miller Street over the years, but its condition has reached the point where it needs to be totally replaced. He said the water and sewer system under it dates back to the 1940s and doing both projects at the same time made financial and logistical sense.

“We have resurfaced it several times, but the street is beyond its useful life now,” Sullenger said. “The utilities are vintage and need to be replaced too.”

Sullenger said the project has been in the city’s Capital Improvement Plan for several years, but has needed to be pushed back several times because of the amount of funding needed to do it. He said the total cost of the project is $1.57 million, but the city received a $325,000 grant from the Michigan Department of Transportaion’s Small Urban Program, which will help soften the financial blow to the city’s street fund. The water and sewer upgrades will be paid for from their individual funds. Overall, the city will have to pony up about $1.2 million for the project.

Sullenger said the construction will not be done at one time, but rather in two-block sections. He said that should ease some of the driving and parking burden for people on Miller Street. He said alternate water lines will be hooked up for residents while the new system is installed.

“We are going to try to minimize the impact to the residents, but there are going to be times when people are not going to be able to get into their driveway and have to park on a side street and walk to their homes,” he said. “We are going to do everything we can to reduce it as much as possible, but we can’t avoid it completely.”

Over the last several years, there have been several large-scale street projects in the city and Sullenger said the next one could be an overhaul of North Second Avenue, from the bridge to Miller Street. He said that, slowly but surely, the conditions of the streets in the city are improving, better than many other communities in the state.

“We actually don’t get many complaints about our streets,” Sullenger said. “When I ‘m traveling around the state and stopping in other communities, I see what their streets look like and I put ours ahead of most other communities. Granted, we have some bad ones that need to be addressed, but if they have bad utilities under them, I don’t want to invest the money on the street, just to tear it up a few years later to put in new water and sewer.”

The project is expected to be completed in November.

Steve Schulwitz can be reached at sschulwitz@thealpenanews.com or 989-358-5689. Follow Steve on Twitter @ss_alpenanews.