Holton street program approved for 2025
The City of Holton has “a pretty good supply of bricks” on hand to facilitate rebuilding a block of one of Holton’s brick streets, as Holton Street Superintendent Greg Tanking told members of the Holton City Commission on Monday.
This year, however, the city’s annual street improvement program involves taking one of Holton’s 85 blocks of brick streets — the 200 block of Wisconsin Avenue — and converting it to concrete, Tanking told commissioners, who approved the 2025 street program on a 4-1 vote during the commission’s regular meeting that evening.
The street program for this year also includes 21 blocks of crack-filling work and 33 blocks of chip-and-seal work, although Tanking noted those numbers may change since “winter’s been kind of a bear this year,” causing more weather-related damage to the city’s streets.
Commissioner Clara Lovvorn was the sole “no” vote on the street program, saying she wanted to keep the 200 block of Wisconsin a brick street, since the 300 block of Wisconsin is and will remain a brick street (the 100 block of Wisconsin is mainly chip-and-seal). Mayor Tim Morris and commissioners Eric Bjelland, Tim Schlodder and Marilyn Watkins voted in favor of the program.
Tanking said that in recent years, members of Holton’s street committee — including Tanking, Charles Eisenbarth, Burton Mannell, Lynn Berges and Rob Snavely — had voiced concerns about the 200 block of Wisconsin, noting that heavy truck traffic that goes up Wisconsin from Iowa Avenue (old U.S. Highway 75) rather than following the “truck route” to New York Avenue and up to the Square have damaged that block.
According to a survey of Holton’s brick streets conducted by Tanking, that section of Wisconsin is in worse condition than all of the city’s other brick streets, and the street committee recommended that instead of restoring the brick street in that area, it would be better to put the block to concrete and use bricks from that block for future restoration projects.
Following objections from Lovvorn and Morris to removing the 200 block of Wisconsin from the list of brick streets in Holton and converting it to concrete, Tanking noted that there are some sections of brick streets in Holton that are more damaged by heavy truck trafffic than others and that the 200 block of Wisconsin is one of them.
“The best course of action might be to concrete it all,” Tanking said of that part of Wisconsin located south of Fourth Street. “But the 300 block isn’t in as bad a condition as the 200 block.”
For more on this and other stories, please log in to your holtonrecorder.net account and select “April 9, 2025” under “E-Editions.”
