PENDLETON — The city of Pendleton is targeting Northwest Despain Avenue for future repairs, but Public Works Director Bob Patterson said the city won’t start determining what those repairs will look like until later this fall.

Stretching from North Main Street to Pendleton High School, Despain acts as a major collector road for the North Hill neighborhood. Heavy use throughout the years has caused wear and tear on the road, and Patterson said the city has banked more than $1.5 million in federal gas tax revenue to do repairs on that street.

But Patterson said the scope of the repair job still needs to be set. Besides figuring out whether the city wants to overlay Despain with a new layer of asphalt or order a more pricey reconstruction job, Patterson said other upgrades like widening certain sections of Despain are still on the table.

The city recently spent $1 million to widen a section of Southwest Byers Avenue, but Patterson said the reasons for widening Despain would be different.

With on-street parking located on both sides of Byers, Patterson said city staff recommended widening Byers so moving traffic on the two-way street would have more room to operate. But with Despain only allowing parking on one side of the street for the length of the road, Patterson said the city would widen Despain to allow for on-street parking on both sides of the street.

While widening Despain is in the realm of consideration, Patterson said such a project would come at the discretion of the Pendleton City Council. He added that the city has usually directed the public works department to focus on asphalt projects rather than widening roads, and the city would continue to focus on paving and repairing roads unless told otherwise.

One of the other factors the city has to consider before moving forward with repairs on Despain is whether it needs to replace water and sewer pipes while doing street repairs.

With some underground infrastructure hovering around the century mark in age, the city has tried to coordinate utility projects with street repair efforts to avoid having to cut into the street multiple times.

Patterson said North Main Street is also on the city’s radar for future repairs, but it too has some complicating factors. Extending northward from the Main Street Bridge up the slope of the North Hill, North Main Street is riddled with potholes and cracks in the asphalt.

But the road is unusually wide for a residential street — it’s wide enough that the street used to include a small parking lot in the median.

Patterson said the city staff would need to figure out how to repair North Main Street without driving up the cost of paving the wide space.