CLEARLAKE— Councilman Russ Cremer brought up an emergency item during the Clearlake City Council regular meeting of Thursday regarding the 18th Avenue Project. The project is supposed to connect Old Highway 53 through the old airport site.
The council authorized City Manager Alan Flora to execute the construction contract on April 6. “We’ve been working with the contractor on preparing for that. Part of the funding for this was through the California Transportation Commission. There’s a pot of funding that the city is eligible for. We loosely call it the ‘self-help funding,’ but it’s open to jurisdictions that have specific local revenue measures for roads. We were eligible for $500,000 for this project,” he said.
“We had some issues with the timing of the commission. We had to work with some of our state representatives to get that part back on track. They will do the final approval of allocation and then we’ll have to come back probably with a special meeting to, again, authorize me to do the contract. We didn’t look at a few other options. We don’t have to use that $500,000 for this project, but they said that we will lose the funding if it’s not allocated for a project by July 4. We don’t want to lose a half a million dollars and there really is time to pivot,” he added. “We just found that out all this week. At this time, we’re recommending that the council take action to rescind the action of April 6 authorizing me to approve the contract for the 18th Avenue Project and I do want you to know that our contractor is aware of this. We’ve been in a lot of communication and don’t feel like it will significantly impact the project schedule.”
Approval was unanimous, with all council members in favor of the project. “I move that we send the price authorization for our City Manager to put the 18th Avenue extension project,” said Mayor Dirk Slooten.
Flora then mentioned a plan to apply for a little over $14 million for housing and infrastructure-related projects. “Unfortunately, HCD (Housing and Community Development) dramatically changed some requirements of the program right in the middle of the process,” he said.
“We are working with our state representatives again on this, but we reduced the scope of the project because of some of the eligibility requirements. It’s just slightly over $5,5 million now. This would include infrastructure upgrades on Old Highway 53 between Olympic Dr and Lakeshore Dr. It would help connect the gardens project, but (the funding is) quite a bit smaller than what we initially hoped of.
Flora noted Clearlake was the only rural community in California which applied for these funds. “There’s supposed to be a specific rural pot for that. We’re hopeful, while the project (funding) is a little smaller than we would really like, that it could still get a good project out of this,” he added.
The goal is to have all the funding allocated in by July 1. “There’s some pressure to get the funding now and that is a critical part of this because in order to meet all the requirements for connected gardens, they have to be at least up by the end of this year. This would support some of the off-site, both traffic and waterline improvements associated with that project,” said Flora.
The Clearlake City Council regularly meets on the first and third Thursday of each month at 6 p.m. at the Clearlake City Council Chambers located at 14050 Olympic Drive. More information on meetings can be found online at https://www.clearlake.ca.us/143/City-Council
