CHINA GROVE — Roadways in a China Grove neighborhood have only gotten worse since being improperly installed more than a decade ago. After a vote on Wednesday, the funding is there to move forward with repairs.

The China Grove Town Council voted unanimously to appropriate $186,000 towards the project to restore the roads in Miller’s Grove, a neighborhood located on West Church Street.

At the meeting on Wednesday, Town Manager Franklin Gover said they received only one bid for the project, which was from Carolina Site Works for $550,000. Thanks to a bond that has been in the town’s control since 2013, China Grove has $200,000 to rehab the roadways. A cash settlement received earlier this year took the total up to $363,000.

Following the measure on Wednesday, China Grove is covering the rest.

“We absolutely need to give those folks some relief,” Mayor Charles Seaford said. “They have been driving over those manhole covers. It’s awful. The potholes are so bad. We just need to make it right.”

Town attorney Tom Brooke added, “The streets got worse as time went by, especially during the winter months.”

Councilor Don Bringle said that Brooke and other attorneys have litigated the issue for over five years.

“You clear one hurdle, and it gets you back to another,” Bringle said. “In the meantime, inflation and the cost of doing business has gone up.

“We have a lot of bad streets in China Grove. That area being a new development is probably the worst. They were not built to standards and are having to (repair) what was done there.”

The roadways in Miller’s Grove are so deteriorated at this point that simple patchwork won’t alleviate the problem.

Gover explained that the process Carolina Site Works will undertake is called a full-depth reclamation.

“It is a little different than your typical pavement,” Gover said last week. “It’s a process whereby the existing material in the street section is milled, ground up and mixed with an engineer-specific amount of concrete, and that forms, in this case, a 10-inch base to work on.”

Work will begin soon, and the contract has the project being completed by Thanksgiving.