CHINA GROVE — Residents in the Miller’s Grove neighborhood of China Grove have been dealing with deteriorating road conditions for more than a decade, but relief may be in sight.

When the China Grove Town Council convenes on Wednesday for its monthly meeting, it will consider a measure to allocate $186,000 towards a project to rehab Miller’s Grove roadways.

The project will repair eight-tenths of a mile of roadway in the neighborhood on Hwy. 152, and is expected to cost $550,000.

Town Manager Franklin Gover explained that China Grove has money that was set aside by the developer 10 years ago.

“We got a cash bond in 2013 for the street infrastructure … and it has been sitting in the bank since then,” Gover said. “It is up to $200,000.”

Gover said that Miller’s Grove was started in 2007 and, like other developments, ran into a wall during the Great Recession.

“Ultimately, it’s the developer’s responsibility to install infrastructure, and the developer failed to build to the town’s standards and failed to complete the streets,” Gover said. “Now the streets have been sitting incomplete since 2007. (With) all the water and traffic, the streets have deteriorated, compounded by the fact that they were never installed to town standards resulting in these conditions.”

Portions of the neighborhood that have been developed since do not have the same issues with the roadways.

“(The problem areas) are phase 1A and 1B,” Gover said. “The back part that was finished out was Phase 2. That was a more recent phase that is now finished.”

Driving through Miller’s Grove, it is easy to see where the phases abut.

“Fast forward to today, we want to make it clear, we want the residents to know that we understand and know the conditions are terrible in the first two phases of this project and that we have been working to find a resolution,” Gover said.

During the January China Grove Town Council meeting, town officials announced a settlement with the developer had been reached for $163,025.

“With the cash bond and settlement, we understand the town is going to have to fix this, and so we have gone through a bid solicitation process,” Gover said. “We hired an engineering firm called TranSystems. We worked with engineers to develop a comprehensive bid package to send out to qualified firms to bid on this project.”

As Gover pointed out, it is going to require more than simple patchwork.

“The damage is so extensive that a normal patch and surface course won’t work,” Gover said. “If you totaled up all the patching that was necessary, it becomes financially unfeasible.”

However, TranSystems has identified a way to comprehensively rehab the roadways.

“(The) process is called full-depth reclamation (FDR),” Gover said. “It is a little different than your typical pavement. It’s a process whereby the existing material in the street section is milled, ground up and mixed with an engineer-specific amount of concrete, and that forms, in this case, a 10-inch base to work on.”

All the required work comes to slightly less than $550,000.

Up for consideration at next week’s meeting is a contract with Carolina Site Works, which was the only bidder after China Grove worked through the bid solicitation process. It is a contractor that China Grove has done projects with in the past.

“They are good to work with,” Gover said.

Per the bid solicitation packet, the work is supposed to be done by the middle of December. Once it gets too cold, work with concrete and pavement becomes infeasible. After Miller’s Grove roadways are repaired, Gover is optimistic that future developments won’t meet similar fates.

“This is not likely to happen again,” Gover said. “We have contract engineers that will supervise the installation of all public infrastructure that developers install. To have a situation where streets don’t meet our standards (will be) unlikely.”

The China Grove Town Council usually meets on the first Tuesday of every month. Next week, the council will meet on Wednesday night instead. On Tuesday, town officials will celebrate National Night Out. The meeting will take place at Town Hall, located at 333 N. Main St., at 6 p.m.