Elizabeth Borough calls for more help from PennDOT

An update was also provided on a project involving the Riverwalk.

Elizabeth Borough officials talked about several instances at their September meeting in which PennDOT has not been helpful with issues in the borough.

Elizabeth Township Police Chief Ken Honick said there was one crash in the borough in August that led to an inspection, warning and violation.

A motor care enforcement officer along with the borough manager Scott Craighead were at the scene, but Honick said it has been “a work in progress” to get PennDOT to be more reliable in the borough.

“I hope by 2025 they will be a lot more involved and Penn-DOT will be a better partner with us with signage,” Honick said. “It’s a lot of phone calls, and I know Mr. Craighead has done his absolute best with the community to beat down the doors of Penn-DOT to get them to be more progressive with the signage and the replacement because we know the goal is eventually for a welcome to the borough sign over top of the downtown corridor and that’s not going to be a good project if we don’t have the compliance ahead of time.”

Craighead added that Penn-DOT is also holding the borough up with construction permits for state sidewalks on Second and Third avenues, and the borough continues to pursue this project.

Construction has been progressing with borough sidewalks and its greenspace project. The stamped concrete in one of the parks was installed this week.

“Hopefully the engineers will be on our side and we need to get that resolved,” Craighead said. “(We are) working in the walkways and the only thing after that are the sidewalks on state roads.”

Riverwalk project

Council also had preliminary discussions about renovations it will be making to a Riverwalk ADA accessible pedestrian walkway, which will be near the Monongahela River with a goal of bringing more people and businesses into the borough.

Application for a Gaming Economic Development Tourism Fund grant for the riverwalk was made last month, and a resolution from May was passed to request a grant from Greenways, Trails and Recreation Program of $250,000 to be used for phase two of the riverwalk.

Craighead received a message from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Pittsburgh District to get an update from the engineer on where they are with plans to raise the barge area near the riverwalk, which won’t be raised until next July sometime after Riverfest.

While there are no plans for the riverwalk or barge just yet, and it is only a concept, Mayor Barry Boucher said they are still in the process of converting some of that original money to plans for the future so they can get more money from federal loans.

“I went to the (Council of Governments) managers meeting last Thursday,” Craighead said at the meeting. “They wanted to know what kind of things we were doing and we wanted to pull together riverfront towns to go after federal money to do some riverfront stuff.”

The borough is looking to get more money — with a total of four grants for the project — and because there is a 10% engineers fee and they didn’t get a quote yet from their own engineers, there were discussions about getting other Pittsburgh experts involved.

“We can pull close to a million dollars and go after more federal money to try to tie out Forward Township’s and the borough and places like that,” Craighead said.