CHERRY TOWNSHIP — A 2-mile stretch of road that has been in poor condition for years is the topic of conversation once again after a group of residents took their long-standing concerns to township officials this week.

Chuck Collins of 207 Harrisville Road said the blacktop road’s condition has been a major concern for years and has reached a point that requires major work.

“It pretty much needs to be taken all the way down and repaved,” Collins said. “This road is not safe. The north end is really bad.”

Collins said the township’s repair and upkeep efforts along the high-traffic road, which carries vehicles bound to and from NT Concepts facility at Iron Mountain, haven’t been effective.

“Lately all they do is throw blacktop down and ... level it off,” he said.

Heavy rains this summer rendered those repairs ineffective, Collins said. He and five other residents took their concerns to the township supervisors on Tuesday.

It’s a subject Collins has been talking about for years. In 2008 he pushed for the township to find funds to fix the road, but eventually came up empty. At the time, a state Department of Transportation consultant recommended that repairs, which would have laid down 3 inches of asphalt on the road, would cost about $200,000.

That’s money township officials say they don’t have to pour into just one stretch of road among about 40 miles that need to be maintained year round.

Supervisor David Mishler acknowledged that Harrisville Road has been “an ongoing problem,” but he defended the township’s work.

“We do the best we can. We’re a small township. We don’t have a huge budget,” Mishler said.

The township is putting together an application for a grant through PennDOT’s Multimodal funding program. But Mishler said even that prospect is uncertain. The grant would require township officials to match 30 percent of its total amount.

Township officials have until Dec. 18 to submit an application to the program.

“We have to work on the north end, definitely,” said Carolyn Yeager, the township’s secretary who is putting together the grant application. “It needs totally redone, that’s just all there is to it.”

The cost of any significant repair to the road would likely run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Mishler said the road needs a layer of hot asphalt mix, “which is going to cost a fair amount of money,” and be of uncertain effectiveness.

“You have to question, how long is a repair like that going to last,” Mishler said.

Rich Rider, who lives at 458 Harrisville Road, said township officials have been battling the road’s poor condition since the 1980s, when he worked for the municipality as an equipment operator. He said poor ditching along the road was contributing to its degradation.

“When you don’t have water running off the road ... that causes a lot of problems,” Rider said.

He said the condition of the road is “extremely poor.”

“There’s times that we have had holes, and some of them pretty deep holes, for months on end.”

Collins said the road, which is used by school buses and residents as well as through-traffic to and from Iron Mountain, has become a problem too big to ignore any longer.

“I tried this before and we kind of gave up,” Collins said. “We’re not giving up this time because it’s a safety issue.”