August 1 was a productive meeting of the Hollister City Council except for one subject – the city’s road maintenance program, or more precisely, the lack of funding for an effective road maintenance program.
It’s a simple numbers game and the numbers represent dollars and road conditions. The average rating of the 250 miles of city roads shows they are in pretty good condition; however, as with so many other things in life, an average road may not even exist. Averages are of little use if the numbers are not normally distributed. In other words, we have some very good roads and some really lousy roads and if you’re regularly using the really lousy ones the good ones don’t matter much to you.
There are some other rules of the roads (pun intended). First, the roads get worse even if they are little used; weather, aging and earth movement damage the roads. Add the overwhelming negative impact of traffic and the roads decline even faster, eventually they fail altogether.
The second issue is the cost of repair. Repairing roads is not straight line cost-benefit equation, it’s a curve. If you repair the roads early in their life-cycle you can extend their good condition for a longer time at a lower cost. If you ignore or delay maintenance and repairs the job becomes more expensive and the life-cycle shorter. Like skipping oil changes for your car, it’s the classic case of “pay me a little now” or pay me a lot more later.”
Now to the bottom line – according to the comprehensive road condition report the annual cost of keeping the roads basically in the overall condition they are now would be $3.8 million to $4.2 million annually (subject to inflation).
It would cost substantially more to improve the overall road network and spending substantially less would result in deterioration of the road conditions.
On the revenue side the city forecasts less than $800,000 from the state gasoline tax fund and some of that is committed to other related issues such as maintaining the traffic signals. We might be able to scrape together another million dollars from state and local funding – maybe – that still leaves us $2 million short just to tread water.
Meanwhile, all those repairs (oil changes) that don’t get done simply increase the bill to get back to even in the future. Eventually, you need a whole new road (engine) and while you wait the roads (your car in our analogy) just performs worse and worse.
Those are the facts, the political finger-pointing can now begin, as always.