The Mayor's Take: Smoothing Cracked Roads, Pavement

In a recent interview, Skokie Mayor George Van Dusen told Patch he has some main goals for the village. Today's article focuses on his goal of repaving Skokie's bumpy and uneven pavement. Next: The mayor talks about addressing crime and strengthening public safety.

Patch: Please describe your goal of repaving. 

Mayor Van Dusen: The board and I feel strongly that we need to step up residential resurfacing. We’ve done a good job on the arterials. We’ve done Skokie Boulevard, Golf Road. We’ve got to get Crawford done. Howard and McCormick have been done.

The major arterials outside of Crawford have been done. We recently got work done on Old Orchard Road.  But it’s the residential neighborhoods we’ve got to concentrate on.

The side effect of having fuel efficient cars-- that has a positive effect-- but the number of cars continues to increase, we still get the wear and tear on the roads, but when people buy less gas, we (government) get less motor fuel tax (revenue).

We take our motor fuel tax (revenue) and use it for resurfacing. So it’s starting to decline, the revenue. We have to find out how to increase it.

We need to find a way to step it up. We do two miles--I’d like to see us do three miles a year, but how are we going to pay for it? We’ve always done it cash out of hand. 

That’s a budget question.  I’ve asked staff to begin taking a look at that. 

Patch: How is the village's infrastructure?

Van Dusen:  Actually our bridges are in very good shape, we prevailed on IDOT (the Illinois Department of Transportation) to do bridges across the channel. They did a couple of them five years ago. IDOT and the county have pretty much taken care of the bridges across the expressway. 

Next in this series: The mayor's take on crime and safety. 

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