Hillsdale City Council voted to stop Barry Street road repair project. Christina Lewis | Collegian

The Hillsdale City Council voted unanimously to reject the Barry Street road repair project at its Monday meeting.

“The people who wrote the letters rejecting the project are still opposed,” Ward 4 Councilman Robert Socha said at the meeting. “That is why I am going to have to be a ‘No’ on this.” 

Barry Street was originally scheduled for repair this summer, but a majority of the street’s residents opposed a plan to create a Special Assessment District that would have required homeowners to pay up to $5,000 each for repairs to the dilapidated road. 

The decision came after extended discussion last month about possible solutions. 

At the March 3 city council meeting, Acting Mayor Joshua Paladino proposed using extra funding from the Capital Improvement Fund, the new endowment from Hillsdale College, and the new SAD policy to offset the costs homeowners would have to pay. According to Paladino, this would have reduced the costs from $5,000 to under $3,000 per residential property. 

But other council members and City Manager David Mackie opposed this proposal. Mackie said he was concerned it would show bias to certain districts and not others. 

“Using this policy to treat other areas differently is disingenuous. You are taking money out of the general fund to prop up a certain district as opposed to all the other districts we have done,” Mackie said. “This is what the government is for, to treat everyone the same. I feel like where we are going with this is inappropriate for the rest of the districts.”

The council postponed discussion of the new proposal to the March 20 meeting and then agreed to vote on the SAD establishment April 21. 

Ward 2 Councilman Will Morrisey said at this week’s meeting that the vote was long overdue. 

“We should put this to rest because we have offered this to a number of neighborhoods over the years and this one and the previous one are the only ones that refused it,” Morrisey said. “I think this should be a government by the consent of the governed, and if they don’t want the special assessment, then that should be it.”

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