Sonoma County Roads Going to Pot(holes)?

The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday discussed how to maintain the county's 1,382 miles of roadway in the face of declining funding. 

The board added 42 more miles of roadway to its list of streets that merit long-term maintenance. The addition means there are now 198 miles of road in the county's Priority Road Network.

said the board should be mindful that rural roads in his northern district and in western Sonoma County are major commute routes and are instrumental in getting the county's agricultural crops to market.

"They won't ever meet the formula for this plan," he said,
referring to prioritizing more heavily traveled routes for maintenance.

Other board members said priority has to be given to the most-used roads until more funding becomes available.

"We have to focus on the roads we can maintain today," Supervisor Efren Carrillo said.

He said voters should decide if they want to tax themselves to maintain roads in their districts.

"It's a quality-of-life decision," Carrillo said.

Supervisor Valerie Brown also said prioritizing higher-use roads has to be the benchmark. "People getting to work and home is the highest and best use of  the roads," Brown said.

The Board of Supervisors unanimously approved researching the formation of road maintenance districts.

Meanwhile, the board decided that an additional 21 miles of roadway will be added to the priority list during a second phase of the road maintenance plan.

That total 219 miles of roadway -- which will cost $8.7 million annually to maintain -- represents 16 percent of the overall roadway in unincorporated areas of the county.

The county's other roads will only be maintained and corrected for safety purposes on an as-needed basis.

Money for roadway improvements has been dwindling, in part because of decreased state funding and increasing pension costs.

County Transportation and Public Works Director Phil Demery said Sonoma County's roads are among the worst in the Bay Area.

"These roads will continue to deteriorate and will become
increasingly more difficult to keep safe," Demery said in his report to the board.

"Without funding for rebuilding these roads, they will eventually deteriorate to a point in which it would be safer and less costly to pulverize and maintain them in an unpaved condition," he said.

County transportation officials are concentrating on maintaining the most highly used and regionally significant roads. Demery estimated that making the needed repairs to all county roads right now would cost $120 million, but the county only spent $5.3 million on roads in the 2011-12
budget year.

The county administrator's office said the portion of general fund revenue devoted to roads has decreased for the past 10 years.

The Transportation and Public Works Department recommended establishing road maintenance districts to raise additional revenue, which would involve taxing residents to pay for repairs in their areas.

Other options include increasing the transient occupancy tax by 1 percent, reducing or eliminating roadside vegetation management, and suspending maintenance of 105 miles of low-volume roads that have alternate access.

One speaker during the public comment period of the meeting said that 85 percent of the 68 respondents to a recent poll objected to being taxed to fix the roads in their areas. The prevailing sentiment is that road maintenance is a "basic county responsibility," she said.

By Bay City News Service