Holton commission hears street plan for 2026

The City of Holton’s annual street plan for 2026 includes curb and brick restoration on part of the 500 block of Kansas Avenue, according to Holton Street Superintendent Greg Tanking, who presented the plan to the Holton City Commission on Monday.

Commissioners voiced their approval for the street program, which also included chip-and-seal and crack-filling projects that Tanking said gave his department “a lot on our plate” for the year. No official vote to approve the plan was needed, according to Holton City Manager Teresa Riley.

Tanking said the main objective with restoration work on that section of Kansas, facing the west side of the former Holton Hospital building, involves repairing the concrete curb on the west side of the street across from the former hospital, which he said was “terrible,” and other sections of curb on the street looked “horrible.”

“There’s virtually no curb there,” Tanking said of that part of Kansas Avenue. “A little farther to the north, we’ve had to patch it with some asphalt just to make there be some sort of curb there. The brick itself isn’t horrible, but the curb is terrible. We did the lay-down curb by hand on the east side of the street in front of the old hospital, so we shouldn’t have to do anything with that.”

Maintaining the concrete curbs on brick streets, as Tanking told commissioners, is essential to the life of the city’s more than 80 blocks of brick streets, the vast majority of which are located in and around Holton’s Town Square. When the curbs start deteriorating, he said, “that’s when the bricks start to really fail.”

For the 500 block of Kansas, Tanking said the plan involves removing bricks near the curbs on the west side of the street, replacing the curb and checking the base under the bricks to “see how far we’ve got to go” with repairing the curb and the base. Gravel will be removed from a parking area on the west side of the street near Fifth Street, and that area will also be filled in with new concrete, he said.

Tanking also noted some base repair is needed to bring an area near the intersection of Sixth Street and Nebraska Avenue back up to grade. A recent water leak caused some deterioration in the base “for about 50 feet from Sixth Street going south,” he said.

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