FAIRHOPE — The city of Fairhope approved an annual resurfacing plan that was over 25% more than expected, leading one city council member to warn about the need to plan for higher prices in the future.
The city council voted to approve the bid of Asphalt Surfaces Inc. to resurface city streets at a cost of $507,916.84. Richard Johnson, public works director, said the budget for the project was $403,000.
"No surprise to anybody, the number's a little higher than we anticipated," Johnson said.
He said the Fairhope Gas Department will pay $91,000 to resurface Orange and Pecan Avenues, which are part of the project.
"They did a gas service upgrade where each of those roads were cut, probably in 40 different locations to upgrade those gas services and so they're going to participate 50% in the resurfacing because they kind of participated in the early demise of the quality and structural integrity of those roads," Johnson said.

"When you add in the participation from the gas fund, we're in a deficit of about $13,785 over budget," Johnson added.
Councilman Jack Burrell said the higher costs should have been brought up for discussion before the bid was scheduled for approval.
"This is the information that we need to know before we vote on a $100,000 increase in an item and we're just not being given enough information here to make an informed decision," Burrell said. "This should be in the package. This is where we're at. This is how we're going to pay for it instead of we want to spend 26% more money than was budgeted."
He said the city should not depend on revenue from sources such as the Gas Department for projects funded from other budgets.
"One day we're going to be caught by this assumption that we can spend that money and the money's not going to be there and we're going to say no, we're not going to spend another $100,000," Burrell said. "We simply don't have it. Something's going to give. We need to fix this road, so something else is not going to be done. That's going to be the harsh reality. We've been very, very fortunate for many years that we can count on essentially revenues exceeding budget."
Burrell said he was also concerned how the spending would affect the gas budget.
Kim Creech, city treasurer, said the Gas Department has enough unspent money in its budget to pay the costs of repairing streets damaged during gas line repairs.
She said that in the fiscal year budget that began Oct. 1, the department included $340,000 for maintenance and had spent $41,000. The budget also includes $200,000 for on-call contractors that was not put out to bid.
"We have some cushion there," she said.
The approved bid did not include paving three city parking lots that were on the original proposal. The city will go out for new bids to resurface the parking lots at the baseball field at Volanta Park, the Nix Center and City Hall.
"We're going to put those back out as a separate stand-alone bid because there are smaller paving contractors that do just parking areas and we're hoping to get a little bit more interest and maybe attract paving companies that don't do mainline road paving," Johnson said.