Feb 22, 2017 By Luke Campbell 4 min read

It’s become a tradition for Yvette Yescas and her family to drive around various Mt. Lebanon neighborhoods during the holiday season to capture the Christmas spirit. From the variety of lights and decorations, Yescas, a member of the Historic Preservation Board in Mt. Lebanon, directs the route based on another allure to fully encapsulate the experience.

She and her family specifically choose brick streets in the community as the primary route for their adventure.

Depending on the coinciding information that needs to be received by Mt. Lebanon commissioners on the costs and longevity of reconstructing the 208 blocks of brick streets, Yescas’ options could soon be limited.

Assistant municipal manager Ian McMeans led a committee that presented the commission during its Feb. 14 discussion session meeting with objectives moving forward about how it could handle those situations.

“The purpose of our committee wasn’t to eliminate all brick streets but to determine which ones are an asset to the community and find the best way to preserve them,” McMeans said about several factors the group took into account, including the 2016 Mt. Lebanon Brick Streets Plan commissioned by the state Department of Transportation.

It also considered the founders of the historic districts, daily usage and dangers relating to public safety with 24 of the 208 blocks of brick streets having too steep of a slope, where asphalt not only would be more cost-effective, but also safer.

The procedure discussed within the committee would have the historic preservation board take the lead on informing the commission with quantitative and qualitative metrics.

But replacing the brick might come down to the dollars and cents, which could range upwards of three times the cost of asphalt.

“For me, for the municipality to possibly pay triple the price for a small group of residents compared to a base amount, it seems to selectively be giving those people a great benefit,” Commissioner Dave Brumfield said. “We could potentially fix three times as much street if we did asphalt and get our roads up to a better level. I’m not diminishing the historical value but just from a financial justification the one thing that has always been said is that (brick streets) last longer and might even out in the long run.”

The substantial life expectancy difference between brick and asphalt comes with hesitancy from commissioners, who noted that bricks aren’t made similar to how they were several decades ago.

“You’re not making it out of the same quality of bricks,” Brumfield said. “I have no confidence at all that a brick street is going to last noticeably longer without that information. Bricks aren’t made as well as they used to be. The bricks you buy today don’t feel the same, don’t look the same and aren’t going to last the same.”

Matt Bagaley, project manager at Gateway Engineers, confirmed Brumfield’s testimony of the bricks being much more porous, but didn’t correlate that to questioning the longevity without having sufficient proof of newly constructed brick streets.

To hopefully reduce, or compensate, for some of the costs possibly associated for reconstructing the historic streets, McMeans suggested a separate funding source for brick-street construction, bidding future construction of the streets outside of regular bids, having the historic preservation board update the status of brick streets on a five-year basis and continuing to evaluate new materials on the market.

Brumfield said that if the desire and price increases to have brick streets adjacent to properties, without long-term expenses outweighing asphalt, then residents should have to contribute to some of those costs.

“I don’t think we can commit to any plan that doesn’t cover a financial shortfall,” he said.

Commissioner John Bendel disagreed with Brumfield about the only beneficiaries of brick streets being those who have houses located directly on those streets.

“The brick streets provide value from a neighborhood standpoint,” Bendel said. “That’s why we are historic. That’s why Mt. Lebanon has textural features not just in the properties and building architecture. It’s everything. We just need the data points to be able to come to some consensus and then it comes down to how much you think brick streets contribute to the value of Mt. Lebanon.”