Sacramento County, get ready for a sea of potholes and rutty roads. Unless things change | Opinion
Sacramento County has 5,200 miles of roads, enough pavement to stretch from here to New York City and back. That’s an estimated $8.3 billion worth of roads. And, at the moment, there is no political path to do anything more than watch them keep falling apart.
A new analysis finds that inadequate public spending on road maintenance will lead to a proliferation of potholes. County roads on average currently score 53 (barely above the “poor” ranking) based on a quality index that ranks pristine pavement at 100. In 30 years, with business as usual, the average county-wide score drops to 21, a roadway system that has officially “failed.”
Imagine a Sacramento, mile after mile, road after road, that is a bumpy, rutted nightmare. That’s our future. And it’s already unfolding, one new pothole at a time.
“There is no possible way that taxpayers are going to come up with enough money to prevent that decline,” local transit activist Dan Allison told local leaders the other day at a Sacramento Transportation Authority meeting. He’s probably right.
Opinion
There is no local issue that hits home like the pothole.
We have three basic choices: We can accept a rutty future of roads befitting an impoverished country. We can spend more money just to keep things as bad as they are today. Or we can spend even more money to make our roads “good,” a paving index score of 72.
The worst roads in the county, which should come as no surprise, continue to be in the vast unincorporated area managed by county supervisors. Carmichael, Orangevale, Fair Oaks, Arden-Arcade and other unincorporated community’s comprise our vast Uncity.
The Uncity has 2,217 miles worth of roads, some 44% of the network. Their average ranking on the pavement index is 44, which makes them “poor.” A full 35% of Uncity roads are officially “failed.”
The best roads, by comparison, are the 559 miles of arteries in the city of Elk Grove. They rank 77 on the same index — somewhere between “good” and “very good.”
County Supervisor Pat Hume, a former Elk Grove city councilman, couldn’t resist commenting on the finding.
“Obviously, Elk Grove’s condition is due to its current and former leadership,” he said.
But behind his humorous attempt at self-admiration is something politically important: Local conventional wisdom is to ask all county voters to raise their sales tax. But local circumstances are different.
The Sacramento Transportation Authority, which disburses sales tax money generated from a half-cent sales tax increase approved by voters in 1988, calculated the additional sales tax increases based on the goal for its elected board.
If the goal is to raise enough money to keep our existing system in its current condition, voters would have to approve a sales tax increase of .43% — nearly half a penny.
If the goal is to have a county roadway system that matches today’s Elk Grove, the sales tax increase would need to be .76%. In Sacramento that would put the sales tax above 10%.
STA has done the county a huge service by doing this analysis and raising public awareness of the issue. Currently, all jurisdictions in the county spend a combined $79 million on fixing roads, according to the authority’s best estimate. If they were spending based on the actual need, they would be spending $381 million. Most spending comes from Measure A sales tax and state funds.
The problem is that polling has shown that Sacramentans have a serious case of tax fatigue. A recent survey found that two-thirds of us feel our taxes are already too high, a finding previously presented to the transportation authority board. The fact that nobody is leading the charge to raise taxes right now may be good politics. But these same voters also hate their roads.
“I have people in my district who have lived on their street for 40 years, and it has never been fixed,” said outgoing Supervisor Sue Frost. “It has gone back to dirt.”
“The poorest people in our county are the ones with the worst roads,” said fellow supervisor Rich Desmond, whose third district includes a large swath of The Uncity.
It’s beyond ironic that the county has the worst roads and that supervisors may build miles and miles of new ones, with new developments mostly in the fringes of the county. These aspirations have been on full display in recent months, as the county has sought to lower housing targets to build more inside existing communities and instead build more roads in new greenfield developments.
This, frankly, is where our elected leaders have to get real.
Local governments spend relatively little of their own money on fixing streets based on their prevailing orthodoxy that someone else should pay, namely a local sales tax and funds from the state. Most citizens, on the other hand, strongly believe that fixing a pothole is the most sacred of local responsibilities.
Therein lies the disconnect, which has led to both the problem and the anger.
County supervisors typically spend about $37 million a year on the rotting roads of The Uncity, according to STA’s numbers. In the coming budget, only $1 million of its own money — general fund dollars — is dedicated to fixing roads (although there is talk of making that $20 million later in the year). Even so, the transportation authority estimates the total Uncity need is closer to $168 million annually for three decades.
Until leaders begin to get unelected due to their neglect of the pothole, underlying politics may not change. It would behoove the Uncity and all local governments to make road maintenance more of a priority with their own money and follow some smart ideas by the transportation authority staff on how to lower project costs.
Letting the roads only get worse, in the strategic hope that it finally motivates voters to dig deeply into their own pockets, would be a recipe for disaster.
