From the desk of Mayor Sam Alai

Happy spring! Nice weather has finally arrived in Northeast Ohio. The sunshine brings so many wonderful things: blooming flowers and trees, family picnics and lots of activity at The Fields.

Our baseball/softball season is in full swing with a large group of volunteer coaches and excited players of all ages. As the season kicks off for the summer, I want acknowledge all the people who make it possible. First, our parks and recreation workers do such an amazing job of prepping the fields for each game and making sure that they are in tip-top shape. Rain delays and rainouts add an extra layer of muddy messiness, but our team does a great job of getting the fields back in order as quickly as possible. If you see them at The Fields this summer, please thank them for all of their hard work.

In addition, the planning and scheduling for our summer sports season is a monumental and complicated task. Each year, I am amazed by their organizational skills, expertise and communication skills. They manage a complicated matrix of teams, field assignments and rain-outs, which require lots of flexibility and pivoting when unexpected things happen. The general public doesn’t really see the people “behind the curtain”, so I’d like to publicly thank Amanda Hutcheson, Ryan Meyer, Gary Diehl, Pete Kormos, and all of their team, who keep everything running smoothly. It is a tough job.

Finally, I’d like to thank all the umpires and coaches. Having attended hundreds of games for my children, and now attending them with my grandchildren, I know that these folks are sometimes the unsung heroes in the games. Their patience, generosity, and time are vital to a successful season. Without them, there are no ball games. When you see them at the games this season, please let them know how much you appreciate their dedication to our kids.

As your mayor, one of my responsibilities is to work with our engineering and service departments to keep our roads in great shape. As you can imagine, it’s a big job. Just like in a household budget, a certain amount of dollars are appropriated each year for various items, including the need to maintain and sometimes replace streets around Broadview Heights. We are very lucky to have people like Ethan Neff and Gene Esser in our engineering department because they use their expertise and training to rate the streets’ “shelf life” and determine which ones are priorities each year. Once those streets are identified, we are fortunate that many of the repairs, maintenance, etc. can be handled by our service department, led by Dave Schroedel. They all do a masterful job of keeping our roads in shape.

As summer approaches, I’d like to also give a little history of our road program and the dollars allocated to it in the last decade 2016-$760,180; 2017-$802,338; 2018- $808,965; 2019- $909,394; 2020- $762,132 and $886,302 to resurface Sprague Rd.; 2021- $992, 721; 2022- $1,131,188; 2023- $1,021,054 and $520,522 on the West Royalton Road project; 2024 is still to be determined.

As you can see, the amount increases each year, with the exception of 2020 because of the COVID mandates. However, in 2020, we were still able to spend over $750,000 on our city streets and another $886,000 on resurfacing Sprague Road. In general, we are paving and resurfacing more roads in the last decade than we have in the city’s history. We will continue to do so in the future.

In closing, I’d like to thank all the people who regularly connect with me to express gratitude and appreciation for the hard work of all of us on the city campus. We really are a team here, and our primary goal is to serve the residents. Your support and kind words go a long way, and I know that all of you “Believe in Broadview Heights”.  For that, I am most grateful.