“The streets fund is in crisis condition.”
That dire assessment was given to the Santa Barbara City Council last week by City Administrator Paul Casey.
With the costs of maintaining and improving the city’s infrastructure continuing to outpace the funds available for them, the council Finance Committee is exploring strategies for closing the disparity.
The committee — made up of councilmen Gregg Hart, Bendy White and Jason Dominguez — met this week to hear city staff’s latest ideas and options on how to better fund city streets.
Principal Transportation Planner Rob Dayton said equipment, workers, and money have been redirected from other projects to street paving, the deferred maintenance of which is beginning to compound its repair costs.
Combined with salary savings from vacant positions, he said, the city has saved $450,000.
According to public works staff, each city block costs approximately $75,000 to $80,000 to pave; contracting the work out to outside entities could potentially bring that cost down to around $55,000 per block.
City engineer Brain D’Amour told the committee that the roads that get the most use receive paving priority.
Some roads “may not get a full re-pave, as we’re trying to make the most use of the limited funds that we have,” D’Amour said. “I don’t know that we’re going to get to a point where we’re able to re-pave every street in the city on a 20-year basis — that’s the ideal — but we’re trying to make the best use.”
Shifting funds from one project or area of the budget to streets is a creative but difficult and short-term stop-gap solution, Dayton said.
Some of the general fund money slated for graffiti removal, land development review, illegal encampment cleanup, and Measure A engineering work could be redirected to streets, Dayton explained.
Another possibility, he said, is to redirect to streets Measure A funding that was earkmarked for the downtown and waterfront shuttles.
The combined savings from all the potential cost shifts come out to $3,377,000, Dayton said, adding that staff was leaning most toward the downtown and waterfront shuttle proposal, which he said would be a relatively straightforward process.
At its June 1 meeting, the council voted to direct more than $800,000 from capital improvement projects, such as ones for parkway landscaping and at the downtown Cabrillo ball field, to paving.
“All these are tough choices, and they are tough political choices,” Casey told the committee, adding that the city is hopeful something will come out of Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget proposal that will allow the state to provide the city with money for capital projects.
“We’re starting to scrape some things together, and on the operational side we’ve scraped together a decent chunk of money,” he said. “So when you put those together, we’ve got a capital program to kind of Band-Aid together for another year or so. It doesn’t help solve our trend going forward, which is really difficult.”
Councilman Bendy White stated that an approach that prioritizes efficiency would be a good starting point.
“I think it’s healthy to be looking forward and trying to squeeze some extra efficiencies out of” the budget, he said.
In terms of dealing with the public, Councilman Gregg Hart said that the best approach would be to speak openly and honestly about the situation.
“I think the public wants to know all the bad news and how much medicine is required to solve the problem,” he said.
— Noozhawk staff writer Sam Goldman can be reached at sgoldman@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.