The Moline City Council could approve an ordinance change tonight that might eventually do away with the city’s few remaining brick streets.

Some of the city’s historic preservationists hope the council will delay such a decision so they can find options to help with upkeep of the streets.

The proposed amendment to the city’s brick street ordinance would require residents living on those streets to help pay for repairing them.

The city has identified 16 brick locations that need repairs, but the work will cost about three times what it would to repair a concrete or asphalt street, Mayor Don Welvaert said.

Mike Waldron, the city’s public works director, said under the city’s proposal, brick streets would be repaired with brick only if residents are willing to pay the difference. Otherwise, the city will pave them with concrete.

Jim Scott of the Moline Historic Preservation Commission, which discussed the issue at a meeting Monday, is worried the ordinance change means all of the city’s brick streets soon will be lost.

“These are the older neighborhoods, and that is the way the streets were set,” Scott said. “This was before the days of concrete construction.”

Commission members said the ordinance change, which had a first reading at last week’s council meeting and could become official tonight, should have come to them for review earlier.

“Basically, anything to do with preservation is supposed to come to this commission first,” Scott said. “In this case, that didn’t happen. The city is not much preservation-minded.”

“We were kept completely out of the loop,” Dan Mizner, another member of the commission, said.

In 1998, the city agreed to the current ordinance, which was sponsored by the commission, Mizner recalled. That ordinance calls for brick streets to be repaired with brick. But since that time, no brick streets have been replaced, Welvaert said.

“With the amount of work needed on the streets in Moline, the city engineering department hasn’t even looked at replacing any brick streets,” the mayor said.

Diann Moore, a Moline resident who attended Monday’s meeting, didn’t understand why the city was in such a rush to do something with the aging brick streets.

“We have so few of them. It’s not like the city is inundated and we have a lot of them,” she said.

Welvaert, who was not at Monday’s meeting, said two brick locations were repaired last year. But that was an emergency situation in which ripples formed in the roadway and, in one instance, damaged a car.

Scott argued that the brick streets are worth the money because they last longer than asphalt and concrete. He said many of the brick streets are around 100 years old.

Barb Sandberg, another commission member, asked the city council to give them a month to investigate possible grants that could help with repairs.

Alderman Scott Raes, Ward 3, who was the only aldermen at Monday’s commission meeting, said he would make a motion to delay tonight’s vote but could not promise the delay would be approved.