The Goleta City Council on Tuesday approved inviting bids for two pavement improvement projects for portions of the northeast Goleta neighborhood. However, the city still has a long way to go, and a lot of money to spend, to fully improve road conditions throughout Goleta.
The city has an overall pavement condition index (PCI) score of 58 out of 100, with the goal to get to a PCI of 67. However, the city would have to spend $25.1 million every year for the next 10 years to get a PCI of 67, according to Joel Ririe, the city’s pavement engineer consultant.
Councilman Stuart Kasdin said he wanted the city to have a more sustainable goal that would make financial sense.
“The reason our numbers have deteriorated is because we haven’t appropriated adequate funding to maintain the roads,” Kasdin said. “By not having a target, we’ve underfunded consistently.”
Ririe explained that most cities don’t even set a PCI goal, but Kasdin said that by not having a goal, the city has ended up with poor road conditions, and repeating that will lead to higher costs and worse roads.
“We want to have something that we think makes sense, something we can afford, something we can commit to and is financially appropriate,” Kasdin said.
The city has allocated roughly $6 million each year for the past three years to go toward pavement rehabilitation.
Councilwoman Luz Reyes-Martin said she was glad to see the improvements the city has made on roads in recent years, but she wants to see more work done before roads get any worse.
“The reality is that $6 million is not only not gonna cut it, it’s actively not helping us get to even any kind of maintenance, let alone improvement,” Reyes-Martin said.
She added that the city needs to find ways to budget more money for pavement improvements.
“I completely recognize that that is likely to lead to difficult choices about what we can’t fund. We have limited resources, but this is a problem that we just cannot continue to ignore, and we haven’t been ignoring it but we need to make real progress,” Reyes-Martin said. “That is going to take significant investment over multiple years. It’s going to take discipline and some hard choices, but our residents expect this of us and we absolutely got to do it.”
This year, the city is taking on two new pavement projects — an arterial pavement project and a residential resurfacing project, estimated to cost $21 million.
The arterial pavement project will involve replacing pavement, upgrading ADA compliant curb ramps, and updated traffic striping in portions of the northeast Goleta neighborhood, portions of Calle Real, Berkeley Road, Hollister Avenue, South Fairview Avenue, Stroke Road and Los Carneros Road.
The residential resurfacing project will include preventive maintenance by adding a new pavement surface of slurry seal to protect the existing asphalt in portions of the northeast Goleta neighborhood.
City staff also included the Storke Road and Hollister Avenue Transit, Bike, Pedestrian and Median Improvements Project as a bid alternative to the arterial pavement project in order to get larger construction bids and use Measure A grant funds awarded to the project.
That project will merge the two southbound bus stops on Storke Road into one, implement median improvements, and improve traffic and bike patterns.
While there are funds to cover the arterial pavement project and the residential resurfacing project, it will depend on the price of the construction bid whether the alternative project is chosen.
Project funding includes a combination of funds from the general fund, gas tax, Local Surface Transportation Program (LSTP), Measure A, and Road Maintenance and Rehabilitation Account — Senate Bill 1 (RMRA-SB1) resources, according to the staff report.
The full scope of work and costs won’t be known until the City Council chooses a construction contractor later this spring.