Pataskala City Council members ended up being free for Valentine’s Day evening after all.

Council members intended to meet Feb. 14 to approve a third public reading of an ordinance allowing the city to go into debt with bond-anticipation notes to finance the Road Asset Management Plan, or RAMP.

However, Mike Compton joined four other council members Feb. 13 in voting to waive the three-readings rule and enact the RAMP ordinance without the third reading.

Council had held a vote to waive the three-readings rule and enact the plan Feb. 6, but Bernard Brush, Compton and Mike Fox, who have voted consistently against taking on debt, opposed the waiver. Generally, city ordinances must be read publicly in three separate meetings so citizens may provide feedback. Council can circumvent the three-readings rule and enact an ordinance immediately if at least five members vote to do so.

Compton, who still opposes going into debt for the RAMP, said he cast the fifth vote to move on with the process.

“We had made our point — no sense in wasting any more time,” Compton said. “I still was against the funding and voted no. As I explained to council, folks in my ward did not want debt.”

Compton represents Ward 2.

Council had voted 4-3 on Feb. 6 to approve the bond-anticipation notes to finance the RAMP. According to the plan, $1.3 million of the road repairs planned for 2012 would be financed in-house, and the city would borrow $750,000 this year and $750,000 in 2013.

Council members had debated going into debt to finance the road repairs. Brush, Compton and Fox were the dissenting votes.

Brush said he opposes going into debt for the RAMP this year because he doubts the city can sustain the level of repairs it intends to complete. He said next year, the police department will require 80 percent of the revenue the city’s income tax generates.

“We can fix a couple roads, but we’ll be back to patch and repair anyway,” he said. “We won’t get much bang for the buck next year.”

He also said he is concerned the project is pitting neighborhoods against each other, as they all want their respective streets to receive work first.

Brush said he would have preferred the city do as much patching as it could with the funds immediately available, then place a street levy on the ballot for the residents to pass when they’re ready.

“I think we can do a lot with patching roads until people are ready to buy into it with a bond levy,” he said.

Mayor Steve Butcher said starting the process now will help the repairs be completed faster.

“These RAMP projects still have a lot of stuff and time that needs invested, and by starting now, we can be ready for the summer construction season,” Butcher said. “These projects won’t be accomplished by our road crews, É these will be major road projects done by professional road contractors.”

He said the next step is to complete the bond process while finishing the detailed engineering process for construction. Then, the projects will go out to bid.

“In addition to this, our own street department crews will be out every day patching potholes, replacing culverts, cleaning drainage ditches, repairing traffic lights and signs, berming the road edges, mowing rights of way and crack sealing,” Butcher said.

He said council authorized hiring a couple seasonal street staff members to assist with berm mowing.

“We will be aggressive this summer again on making large patches and repairs to roads not on this year’s paving lists,” he said. “Lastly, this whole debate has made clear the number of roads and costs of replacing the huge number of failing roads we have in a 34-square-mile city and the need to find additional funding.”

Butcher said the city will aggressively pursue grants, and during the coming weeks, it will finish another attempt at capturing a multimillion dollar grant for Mink Road repairs. However, he said, he is not optimistic about the city’s chances for the grant.

“We must be honest, though, and say that given the number of communities applying for road grants, that grant dollars are shrinking and that as the size of our city grew, our eligibility for grants shrunk,” Butcher said.

He said that while the city has successfully earned grants the past four years, he doubts that trend is likely to continue.

“Given the size of the problem we face, we can’t expect that grants are the real solution,” Butcher said. “While attracting business and industry and creating new revenue streams is a long-term solution, the problem we face with our infrastructure is critical. The cost is our problem and we must find a way to fund replacement.”

Butcher said residents whose home streets are not on the 2012 RAMP schedule should not believe that their roads will be ignored.

“Our road crews will be out every day using a new hot-patch machine that we purchased last year to make better, longer-lasting patches to the roads,” he said.

Butcher said the hot-patch machine is equipped with a timer that allows it to heat patching material overnight before crews arrive for the work day, which saves a great deal of time.

“Our crews show up and can head out without waiting on hot asphalt,” he said.