St. Paul residents looking to postpone street reconstruction in their neighborhoods may soon be out of luck.

St. Paul Public Works allows residents to petition to “opt out” of the city’s street reconstruction schedule, but council members say it hasn’t worked as intended. Opting out means a project moves to the bottom of the list, delaying roadwork for decades.

“We were seeing that the opt-outs were happening in neighborhoods that have less means,” City Council President Amy Brendmoen said Monday. “It was more ‘putting it off to later’ instead of opting out, and by then, an entirely new homeowner might be in the home, and the price would undoubtedly be higher.”

In 2013, the city council somewhat curtailed the practice by requiring that the petition span an entire project area, not just an individual block or street. Many projects span several blocks in multiple directions.

On Wednesday, the council is expected to eliminate the option altogether.

A resolution sponsored by Brendmoen and Chris Tolbert states that the purpose of St. Paul Streets — the former Residential Street Vitality Program — is to reconstruct streets that are at the end of their useful life or never were formally constructed.

“There is a significant positive effect on the revitalization of neighborhoods when streets are paved and lighted,” the resolution reads.

When property owners band together to delay street projects, the councilors say, residents citywide end up paying more to maintain the roads, plan projects and ultimately rebuild them.

“Department of Public Works needs to plan many months in advance and spend staff resources to engineer these projects; permitting a project area to delay a project increases the time and resources spent on engineering these projects,” the resolution continues.

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St. Paul City Council relaxes housing density restrictions near transit corridors The opt-out question recently arose in the Woodlawn-Jefferson area of Macalester-Groveland, where residents saved 53 trees last winter by rallying to prevent the city from installing sidewalks. As a result, Public Works officials informed them the entire project area had been moved to the bottom of the city’s street paving program, setting those road improvements back 20 years or more.

More recently, residents have expressed concern about large assessments related to mill-and-overlay projects in various parts of the city, but that kind of project is not eligible for opt-outs by petition.

The former R.S.V.P. recently was renamed St. Paul Streets, and arterial street reconstructions were added to the project list.