HOLLIDAYSBURG — Gas company project frustrations, stormwater mitigation, its new blight committee and a Native American site were topics of discussion during Hollidaysburg Borough’s council meeting Thursday evening.

During his manager’s report, Ethan Imhoff said he had been “getting a lot of complaints about the roads, particularly Mulberry Street, Penn Street and now Walnut Street.”

“The gas company, they’re making a lot of upgrades to their lines in the borough,” Imhoff said. “A lot of that work was done last winter and continued on into spring.”

The gas company didn’t fully pave the roads last fall and “left it with cold patch,” which is designed for repairing and patching blacktop surfaces. Imhoff said the cold patch “sank over the wintertime” because the area “had a rough winter.”

“We have the situation now where a lot more people are getting out and about and the roads are still in rough shape,” Imhoff said. “That cold patch has done its job and it’s time to be replaced.”

Imhoff said he’s been in contact with the gas company and “let them know our frustrations.” He added it appeared there was some “kind of a handshake agreement with the gas company” that each would take care of things on their respective ends regarding the project, which began before Imhoff’s tenure as borough manager.

“The borough does have an ordinance that requires the gas company to obtain a permit, to put down bonds, to provide a schedule and abide by that schedule, and because of this handshake agreement, the ordinance really wasn’t being followed to a T,” Imhoff said. “But we’re going to go back to following the ordinance to a T.”

Imhoff said one of the borough’s frustrations has been the lack of notification, and gave the example of the gas company starting work on Walnut Street “just the other week.”

“Nobody called my office, nobody called the police department, nobody called public works,” he said.

“They just showed up and started doing this project,” Imhoff said. “That creates a lot of problems for us and certainly frustrations for the residents, so I’m going to be composing a letter that’s going to go out to the gas company, along with a copy of the ordinance.”

Imhoff also gave updates on the borough’s two stormwater mitigation projects, the first of which is located in Gaysport.

He said the borough’s consultant spent the past month “digging, collecting and documenting” Native American artifacts found at the designated stormwater retention pond site on a plot of land commonly referred to as the Stowell Farm in Gaysport.

Imhoff said they’ve been discussing whether they would need to move on to a phase two study now that phone one is complete. They have documented where the artifacts were found, what they’re suspected to be, with “all that information being prepared to be sent down to the preservation office in Harrisburg,” he said of the consultant’s work

Imhoff said the consultants believe the site was likely a day trip site for local Native Americans, who might have had a village near the Mielnik’s shopping plaza in Frankstown and would travel to the Stowell Farm area to hunt, fish or gather.

“Our historic preservation consultants are telling us that, based on everything they found, they think the state will require a phase two investigation,” Imhoff said.

If that were to happen, the project would be pushed to sometime in 2026 and “we just have no control over it because it’ll take another three to four months to do the additional study,” Imhoff said.

As for the second stormwater project, in Hollidaysburg’s East End, Imhoff said they met with PennDOT “a couple weeks ago” and spoke about how to enhance the project that would make it more attractive from a multimodal perspective for grant funding.

“The goal here is to get the project written to apply for a multimodal grant later this summer,” Imhoff said.

Council member William Kitt, who also sits on the borough’s new blight committee, said they had “a lot of input” during their last meeting on April 2.

“Leydig’s True Value contacted me about donating some paint through a program that they have,” Kitt said. “It’s 20 gallons of paint to do some upgrades and I’m exploring what we can use that for and how we can do that.”

Kitt said there’s criteria the committee had to fulfill, such as identifying a property they want to upgrade or maintain and find someone to paint it, like the Boy or Girl Scouts.

Now in its fourth month, Kitt said the blight committee has “very good criteria to identify blight” and so far has “identified one dangerous structure.”

“We’ve got a long way to go,” Kitt said. “We’re still young, but we’ll get there.”

The committee’s criteria is numbered one to eight so they can deal with properties violating all eight criteria before properties violating just one or two, Kitt said.

In other matters, Imhoff said the borough is “still shooting for” having a final draft of its comprehensive plan put together by May 1. Council also approved a land development plan for the Blair County Genealogical Society at 431 Scotch Valley Road.

Council President Sean Burke said the society owns two parcels and applied to merge them, which was approved. They then applied to construct a 1,200-square-foot addition onto their library at their property, which was reviewed and found to be “in full compliance” with the borough’s zoning and ordinances.

Mirror Staff Writer Rachel Foor is at 814-946-7458.