Something that comes up frequently is road project selection and funding of road projects.
Selecting road projects is always a tough task. Many years ago, the City purchased a software program that helps us pick which roads to repair. So how does software rate our roads? It's actually based on a number of inputs, not just the condition of the street surface. Traffic counts do affect the rating. If two roads are in equally bad condition, with no doubt the road that has more traffic gets the nod. If a road has no curb and gutter and suffers from drainage issues, that road gets a higher rating than a similar road that has good drainage. "Ride-ability." How is the road to drive down? If it has lots of surface cracks but rides okay, the rating may go down. On the other hand, if the road has few cracks but several heaves or depressions where the base under the road has gone away, the rating will go up.
So when is my road getting redone? If you've ever called the City of Sterling, you've likely not gotten the answer you hoped for. Each spring, the public works department and our consulting engineer go out and update the ratings for as many streets as they can. Winter and the freeze thaw cycle are never kind to the roads and some suffer worse than others which requires the annual updates. While your road may be 20th on the list, this year, it may move up or down a bit by next year depending on how bad the winter was on all of our streets.
The other problem with predicting when your road will be done is the cost of doing it. While the local options sales tax is a very valuable tool for the community to make sure roads get done, the cost of reconstructing roads is something we have little control over. 4 years ago, a typical residential block cost about $25,000 to reconstruct. That's tearing out the old, repairing the base and putting the new road down and reseting the manholes, curb cuts etc. This year, we're at roughly $45,000 per block. How does that happen? The major issue we face is the cost of oil has skyrocketed in 4 years. Asphalt is essentially a rock and an oil derivative mixed together. So asphalt has nearly doubled, the cost to deliver the road rock for the base and the asphalt for the surface has doubled and it's not hard to see why the cost to the City has doubled.
Believe me, it's very frustrating to see our community's dollars going half as far as they did just a few years back for street projects, but as a City, we have no control over the cost of oil and asphalt. We're at the mercy of the markets. In hindsight,we'd have been geniuses if we'd sold $10 million in bonds in 2003 to do road projects at those 2003 costs. Of course had we done that in 2003, people would have probably thought we were off our rockers. Hindsight is always 20/20.
I'll post more about Motor Fuel Taxes in the future.
