Streetscape Alternate #6

Folks, it don't get any simpler than looking at the road maintenance budget to see if the city is taking care of core infrastructure and truly has a balanced budget.

At this week's budget meeting I pointed out, that once again, the city was not keeping up with roads maintenance. This means the future will have to pay for the maintenance that we should be doing now and it becomes more costly as roads get worse. It is sort of like letting a cavity go really deep and then needing a root canal. It would have been cheaper and more pleasant to not wait.

Here is what Jim Bond had to say (the issue was basically blown off otherwise):



According to the Mayor, it seems that one way to calm traffic is to let the roads crumble. Running with that sort of thinking, maybe all we need to do is jack hammer the Leuadia 101 asphalt to fix the traffic problem. That would be a lot cheaper than the Alternative #4. I've sent Jim an email to see if he wants to clarify.

Jim's part about 9 mill/year being for a platinum roads system is nauseating spin. The 9mill/year is not to make the roads super awesome. It is to catch up the with old maintenance that has been ignored. The low level of maintenance that the city has been doing has already accumulated $17 million in deferred maintenance. That is indebting the future. I have no doubt that Jim knows exactly the score here, but maybe he'll surprise me.

Don't forget that the report shows the city has been (and is going to be) seriously underfunding streets maintenance is the same report they tried to keep secret. The city is still keeping secret its communications with the consultant (aka instructions to manipulate the report?).

From the City's report (regarding the status quo appraoch):

Scenario 1. Existing Budget ($1.15m/year, increasing by $50k a year)
In this scenario, the City’s existing funding level is $1.15m per year, with an annual increase of $ 50,000. As a consequence, the City’s network condition will drop from the current PCI of 73 to 69 by 2014. Also, the maintenance backlog will continue to increase from $17.8 m to $34.8 m. In addition, 65.8% of the network will be in the good to excellent condition category, and will increase from 0.8% to 4.7% in the “failed” category. While the drop in pavement condition is relatively small (4 points), the doubling of the backlog is much more alarming, and is of greater concern.

From the draft budget (the amount for street overlay):
Going from 1.2 to 1.5 is better than nothing, but it isn't balancing the budget. Its kicking the can down the crumbling road.