Work underway on Bell Acres portion of road in need of repairs

Vita Slipak lives on the Bell Acres and Sewickley Hills border along a winding gravel road that stretches both boroughs and into Sewickley Heights.

For months, she has been extra cautious when leaving her home along Hunt Road for fear of damaging her car.

“No matter which way you go on the road, you will be in a pothole,” Slipak said on Nov. 5. “I’m very careful. I go very slow and I curse every pothole that there is.”

She has lived in the area for about three and a half years after moving from the eastern part of the state to be closer to family. There are about six houses along Hunt Road and none are in the Sewickley Heights section.

“We have people paying taxes and we would like to live on a road that you can use,” Slipak said.

Slipak said she reached out to Bell Acres officials in early August and spoke with Sewickley Hills officials in September to do something about the road’s condition.

The Bell Acres portion is from the top of the hill at Henry Road and is largely made of black asphalt millings.

The borough property line ends in Slipak’s yard, which is where the Sewickley Hills portion with gray gravel begins. That borough’s stretch of the estimated 3/4-mile road ends near the last house and the remaining flat land is maintained by Sewickley Heights.

Bell Acres borough manager Lisa Public said Hunt Road was on the current list of street improvements.

The borough budgeted $32,000 for road repairs this year, including Hunt, Sevin Road and Turkey Foot roads.

Public works crews went to work on Hunt Road on Nov. 3. The Bell Acres section is expected to be done this month.

Repair efforts included reshaping of the cartway, applying screened asphalt millings, followed by compaction and rolling of the cartway, and cleaning and re-establishing the ditch lines along the side of the road.

“It’s very important to maintain all of our roads, whether they are dirt and gravel (or) paved,” Fleming said on Nov. 5. “We know that that’s a dirt road. So, we always plan to maintain it every year, whether it’s cleaning out the ditches, the ditch line, adding more material, doing restoration work.”

Beadnell Road, another unpaved Bell Acres road, is expected to be addressed next year with the help of grant funds.

Fleming encouraged residents to reach out to the borough office if they see any roads that need to be addressed.

“We address any concerns that the residents have,” she said. “That’s part of our services that we maintain (roads) with our public works department and our safety department.”

Sewickley Heights borough manager Nathan Briggs said Hunt Road’s topography has made it easier for his borough to maintain its portion that empties onto Audubon Road.

“We’ve put some money into that road over the years,” Briggs said. “It is a little bit easier because it’s flat. It starts to get a little more hilly through the Hills and Bell Acres. I think they have more stormwater impact, so ours is more simple to manage. We put in new culverts there two years ago and we’ve done some work on the stream bank as well.”

Briggs said every road is important, from large state thoroughfares like Way Hollow Road that connects Sewickley Heights to Edgeworth to smaller strips, even with no residents directly impacted.

“In the end, they are all equally important,” Briggs said. “We do our best to keep them open. We’re having problems with two of our other locally-owned roads right now.

“We were lucky with Hunt Road. We worked with the Allegheny County Conservation District quite a bit over the years to get funding to work on that road as a gravel road in Allegheny County. That worked to our benefit and allowed us to invest more into that road.”

Briggs said there have been no conversations between the boroughs to pave Hunt Road, which he anticipates could lead to more traffic.

Siplak said Sewickley Hills filled potholes last year, but repairs did not last long. There is a large pothole and a few smaller potholes next to each other near another residence about 100 yards away from her home along the Sewickley Hills side of things.

Sewickley Hills contracts out a lot of its services, including police protection, and there is no public works department listed on the borough’s website. Sewickley Hills officials did not return multiple messages seeking comment.