TROY – Ignoring the advice of the city attorney, a Troy City Alderman continued at the August meeting his quest to use city funds to replace a culvert on a private street where his daughter lives.

Dennis Detert has been lobbying the board of aldermen from well before he was elected in April to replace a collapsed culvert under Dana Avenue, a private street.

“I would like to see them replace this culvert because it’s a safety issue,” Detert said. “It’s went out once. And it strands people. Now granted it’s only two homes. But I ask anybody out there, if your family member lived in one of those two homes and the fire department or the ambulance could not get to them to possibly save their life, what do you do?”

Detert’s daughter lives in one of the two homes and he openly asked the city attorney if it violated state law regarding conflict of interest for him to lobby and vote for the repairs.

“It is not a legal conflict because you’re not going to be directly profiting,” City Attorney Brian Sinclair said. “(But) I would strongly caution you because it does not look good.”

Undeterred by how it may look, Detert claimed the board is likely related to “half” the residents in town.

“There’s six of us up here on this board that represent the city of Troy. Those six people, if they …cannot vote on anything that may affect a citizen because they’re remotely related or directly related, this board’s worthless,” he said. “Half of the city, we’re probably related to some way, some state, some form. Should we just ignore the citizens then?”

While still unwilling to concede the street is a private one, despite the lack of evidence it was ever dedicated to the city, Detert argued it didn’t matter either way.

“Well, if it’s a private street, my question is why are you destroying my private property, or not my private property, but the citizens that live there,” he asked. “Why would the city destroy their property? Because they want to use their property for the infrastructure, their storm water infrastructure?”

After his election in April, Detert convinced the board to direct city staff to come up with an estimate for the culvert repair.

That estimate was presented at Monday’s meeting at $51,000, a figure Detert accused the city staff of intentionally inflating.

“So it makes me wonder why we got this $51,000 figure to outsource the replacement culvert. We got a public works department. Quite sure that they have replaced culverts around the city, streets, and everything else,” he said. “We buy all this equipment for the public works, but they can’t do it. We have to outsource it. Or is it outsourcing on this just to elevate the cost to make it look like we’re wasting the taxpayers’ money?”

City Administrator James Knowles aggressively defended the estimate.

“I would like to say on behalf of the staff, I do not appreciate the insinuation something was misconstrued or misrepresented or lied about by the staff,” Knowles said.

He further stated the $51,000 estimate included the cost to replace the entirety of the culvert and not just the portion under Dana Avenue, along with costs for easements and to reimburse the expense of another nearby homeowner who already paid for improvements.

Knowles also reminded the board they would be setting a precedent when it came to improvements on private property.

“If we’re going to do this here, we’ve already gone through this before, this is not the only situation like this here in our community, we’re going to be having this conversation multiple times over,” he said. “We’ll be right back. And you’re still opening up a can of worms because it’s not a public street.”

Knowles also disputed the notion the city’s responsible for water draining into the creek which existed when the homes, and the culvert, were built.

“You can’t call it our stormwater facility, it is a creek,” Knowles said. “The creek existed in 1965. The water was going there in 1965. Nobody piped it there.”

Detert eventually agreed to withdraw his motion to repair the culvert in favor of tabling it so the city staff could determine where the water is coming from.

Mayor Ron Sconce said the matter would be discussed again at the September meeting.