ELYRIA – Everyone dislikes road construction. Come next spring, no one will dislike it more than the business owners who have set up shop on East River Street.

That’s when heavy pieces of road equipment will churn up asphalt – making travel impossible for months as crews reconstruct the road from EMH Regional Medical Center to the city limits.

“It will be horrible. People avoid construction,” said Sam Spicer, owner of the Convenient Food Mart and the small shopping plaza where it is located at the corner of Fourth Street and East River Street. “I’m pretty worried about what’s going to become of my business when people start finding a new route because they don’t want to deal with the construction.”

The $1.7 million project, funded by the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, will include replacing the 4-inch waterlines with new 8-inch lines to increase water pressure in the area, adding new curbs, sidewalks and driveway aprons, and regrading the tree lawns.

That could leave Spicer and the owners of Puffer’s Floral Shoppe, Subway, Sambino’s Pizza, Roadhouse Tattoo, Cut It Up Barbershop and EMH Regional Medical Center scrambling to find ways to ensure their clients can get not only through the door but into the parking lot.

The project will be nothing like the sewer repair project Spicer watched unfold outside his door Wednesday.

That work, which lasted until the end of the day Friday, prevented drivers trying to head south from going down the road. Customers trying to get to the plaza where Convenient, Sambino’s and Subway all are located had to squeeze in through a single driveway.

When the work stretches into several months as will be the case next spring, the city is obligated to ensure that the work does not close a local small business, said City Councilman Larry Tanner, D-1st Ward.

“We have to answer the very important question of are people still going to be able to get to these businesses?” he said. “Are we going to be able to provide some kind of egress and regress for their businesses? We have to come up with some way of working this out with the contractors.”

Spicer said he has lived through construction before and knows what it does to his business.

“When they closed the East Fourth Street bridge, I never got back the business I lost from that,” Spicer said. “People just found a new way to go and never came back. Business is so bad at the moment, I can’t afford to lose any at all.”

In August 1997, the East Fourth Street bridge was demolished and rebuilt in a project that lasted roughly 14 months. Then, the bridge carried more 8,000 cars a day across the Black River between downtown and Eastern Heights.

At that time, businesses like the old Heights Video store said they saw as much as a 50 percent drop in business because of the project.

Knowing what happened in 1997, City Councilman Garry Gibbs, R-3rd Ward, said now is the time for the city to come up with a working plan for business owners. He has asked city leaders to meet with owners soon to determine what can be done to help.

The project will also mean the loss of more than two dozen trees that will have to be cleared for the road widening, which concerned many of the road’s residents. New saplings will be planted to replace any trees that are cut down, said John Schneider, assistant city engineer.

Contact Lisa Roberson at 329-7121 or lroberson@chroniclet.com.

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