CITY DUMPS ROAD FROM PAVING PLAN; TRANSPORTATION TAX FUNDS WON'T BE USED ON JASMINE

Tricia Brown was more than excited when she saw signs of surveying work on Jasmine Lane.

She was overjoyed.

Brown said the sight of little blue flags in her yard, put there in April to mark water lines, literally made her jump up and down. Finally, after years of struggling with the city, her street was going to be paved.

Better than that, it would cost homeowners $10 per frontage foot. The rest was to be paid by a half-cent transportation sales tax voters passed in August 1995.

Then, without notice, Jasmine slipped off monthly Transportation Trust Fund updates. Magnolia and Dixie, two nearby gravel streets, remained on the plan. The city currently is acquiring easements for paving work on them.

Dale Pingel, who lives across the street from Brown, said he found out about the change when he approached a city worker who was getting the Dixie easements. Pingel asked when he would be asked for an easement and was told Jasmine wasn't on the paving plan anymore.

"All along, we were given the impression that we were going to be included in any project out here," he said. "We had city councilmen come here one morning and say there would be no problem with paving our street all the way out to Rampart."

The Browns and Pingels, along with Tom Hinkebein and David and Gina Herzog, all own land on one controversial block of Jasmine. All believed the street would be paved at $10 per frontage foot, Pingel said.

But according to City Manager Michael G. Miller, Jasmine isn't a gravel street maintained by the city. It's an unmaintained right-of-way, and those don't qualify for improvements under the Transportation Trust Fund.

When the subdivision was designed in 1956, Jasmine, then called Azalea, was marked as a street. An actual roadbed never was constructed.

In 1958, when the subdivision was annexed into the city, there was no city ordinance saying developers must pave streets in their subdivision. Azalea became merely an unmaintained city right-of-way, still with no homes on it.

When people began buying land on the 2900 block of Azalea, where the Browns and Pingels now live, they hauled in gravel to create a road. Still, the road wasn't a city-maintained gravel street. It was more of a glorified driveway, Miller said.

In 1991, long before the transportation sales tax was passed, the residents of Dixie, Magnolia and Jasmine petitioned the city to have their streets paved. The plans were completed by an outside engineering firm in 1993.

But the area needed sewers, too, City Engineer Mark Lester said. Residents decided that the cost of paving their streets and putting in sewers was too high, and they opted for only the sewers.

When the paving issue emerged again last year, plans for the three streets already existed.

"The Transportation Trust Fund set out that only existing gravel streets would be paved," Lester said. "We wrongly included Jasmine because the three streets were a package deal before. It didn't dawn on us to take it off the list."

To make Jasmine a city street, property owners would have to petition the city. After required public hearings, the City Council would have the final say on whether to accept maintenance responsibilities for Jasmine.

Even if it becomes an official city street, the residents still will have to pay the full paving cost.

Since Jasmine was taken off the list, Dale Pingel has appeared before the City Council. If Jasmine is nothing more than a glorified driveway, he said, it shouldn't have taken a 1978 city ordinance to change its name from Azalea.

He also questioned why the city hasn't told him when Magnolia and Dixie became dedicated city streets.

And while the city manager sent Pingel a list of 47 "unopened right-of-ways" comparable to Jasmine, Pingel said none of them are on city maps and have people living on them, as Jasmine does.

The Browns and Pingels even looked into paving Jasmine themselves. Unless they do it by the city's plans -- which include a $25,000 water retention basin -- the city won't take over the street for maintenance. That would mean no pothole fixing or snow removal service.

All the facts and figures aside, Brown, Pingel's neighbor, said she doesn't understand why the city got her family excited about the transportation sales tax, then let them down after it was passed.

"I called people and said, `Vote for it! Vote for it!'" she said. "We were really instrumental in getting this thing passed, and then it was like, `Thanks for your help. Goodbye.'"