RAMSEY - Closure of Alpine between Nowthen Blvd. and Sunfish.

It appears earlier work when the triangle property bordered by Nowthen, Alpine, and Sunfish was built into town homes needs rework. Back then, about a decade ago, services were brought north from the wetland behind the school, that area, and the storm sewer under that stretch of Alpine is being worked on, where completion time for that and the intersection at Nowthen Blvd is uncertain but with both items of work being done concurrently. It leaves Sunwood and Hwy 116 (Industry Blvd to those with a sense of history) as the only cross link between the two roads, along with the intersection where Sunfish runs into Nowthen Blvd.

I had an opportunity to meet Michael McDowall of Ramsey's engineering dept. at the project site. He fits the pattern of being a staff person good at meeting members of the public.

Foot traffic is really constrained while that project is pending. There is the trailhead on Alpine's south side, where one can walk the trail to reach where 151st deadends, and from there along 151st east to Nowthen (bypassing to the south of the intersection work and reaching Nowthen roughly at the driveway to the old city hall site - when it was centrally located and at a convenient walking distance from established Ramsey residences).

Let us hope the work is promptly finished, and with the rework now, we can hope it will not need to be done yet again and again. And again. It is unclear to me what failed from the initial installation of sewer work, i.e., why the rebuild is needed.

Let us hope stealth installation of sewer/water in the large-lot neighborhoods where it is both unneeded and unwanted by residents is not a part of things. Vigilance over that possibility is necessary, in that WAC and SAC charges can be outrageously expensive to existing homeowners (while crabgrass [aka developers] seem to magically get SAC/WAC waivers, real people are the ones who can end up getting screwed fiscally, big time, which is the exact opposite of how local government should behave).

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Another hope, due to the expense of it, is that the sewer work (storm and sanitary) under Sunfish Blvd near its northern end does not need redoing. That would be a humongo thing, as it was about a decade ago, when the road was dug into a massive trench for weeks and weeks, with ongoing extensive dewatering effort to allow the pipe placement. If that was done badly and needs replacement, questions would need to be asked - who did the engineering and quality inspections, etc. That routing was from the triangular town home development to points well north of the Sunfish and Nowthen intersection [the gun club and the cornfield out by Peterson's house]. It was a multi-million dollar project cost, then ...