Bemidji City Council Holds Hearings on 2025 Street Construction Projects

The Bemidji City Council conducted two public hearings during Monday night’s meeting for summer construction projects that in total involve just under one-and-a-half miles of roads.

The first public hearing was for the 2025 Street Renewal Project, which plans to add new pavement, curb and gutters, driveway aprons, and sidewalks to five different streets within the city. These include portions of Hannah Avenue NW, Norton Avenue NW, 14th Street NW, Taft Avenue NE, and Mill Street NE.

A resident in one affected area approached the council with concerns about Norton Avenue NW, saying there has been a water collection problem there for some time, and is hoping this renewal project will fix the issue.

“The plan for 14th Street is it’s actually a rural street now. … We are planning to urbanize it and put in curb and gutter,” said Sam Anderson, Bemidji City Engineer, at the hearing. “What we typically see is that kind of creates that bathtub effect to trap that water that typically just kind of migrated wherever it felt it wanted to go, and now we’re going to catch that water in those curb lines. There is storm sewer that exists today and that’s hard to get that water to go where we want it to go. … We should be able to resolve all that with this project.”

The second public hearing was for the Park Avenue NW Reconstruction Project. The plan is to reconstruct half a mile of the road from 15th Street to Paul Bunyan Drive, with improvements like new pavement, driveway aprons, and sidewalks, along with a significant replacement of a water main and the sanitary sewer system.

“The other big driver for this is the sanitary sewer is in dire need of replacement,” said Anderson, “We’ve had some issues with that. A lot of people have had some issues with their service lines and had to replace them. When they did that work in the 90s, they did not replace a lot of that. So even though the surface pavement maybe isn’t as old as we would have hoped, it still does warrant some replacement, but some of it is kind of the totality of all the other infrastructure, it has to be redone.”

He added, “We are going to shoot to keep the west curb line where it is today. We’re going to keep it in the same location, which is going to allow us to reuse a lot of the existing storm sewer that’s not terribly old. That alone is going to save us close to $100,000 on this project.”

It is estimated that both projects will cost $3,961,078 in total. The street renewal project will be funded using a combination of the city tax levy and utility funds, while the Park Avenue NW Reconstruction Project will be funded using state aid funds along with utility funds.