Sonoma County grapples with high road repair demands, limited budget

Most Sonoma Valley roads are more crowded at all daylight hours than the Hanna Boys Center auditorium was last Tuesday night, when county officials held a once-delayed 'Roads Town Hall' to unveil the roads planned for repaving over the next two years – and to explain how those roads were selected.

Some familiar problem spots were addressed, but judging from the reaction of the three dozen residents in attendance at the last week's meeting, there are about three dozen sections of road that were overlooked: the roads they drive on, the roads they live on.

'This stretch of road is like a third world country,' complained Conley Smith of Sonoma at the meeting of his own home stretch. Saying that he recently had out-of-town guests, he added, 'It's terrible to get schooled on roads by someone from New Jersey.'

The road he was complaining about was Highway 12 as it bends through the city, but county officials on hand were quick if not relieved to point out that Highway 12 is the responsibility of Cal Trans, the state's transportation department, and not the county's Department of Transportation and Public Works (TPW).

Still, they didn't entirely dismiss Smith's observations, acknowledging their road repair and pavement replacement budgets were too low for the needs that Sonoma County has.

The town hall took place on Wednesday, Jan. 15, about 10 weeks after its originally scheduled date in early November, when the Kincade fire evacuation and PG&E power shutoffs scuttled that event. But all the relevant county government officials were on hand – including TPW director Johannes Hoevertsz, deputy director Janice Thompson, public information officer Daniel Virkstis and 1st District Supervisor Susan Gorin – to explain the Pavement Preservation Program, its funding, its priorities and its goals.

The schedule lists 9.3 miles of roads in the Sonoma Valley that will receive new surfaces in the Pavement Preservation Program for the next two-year period, 2020-2021. The list of roads selected is relatively slight, and several of them get only a few hundred feet of new pavement. The streets include sections of Arnold Drive, Greger Street, Siesta Way, Solano and Riverside, though the longest stretch appears to be Linden Street, parallel to Arnold between Verano all the way to Petaluma Avenue

But Petaluma itself, which at least one attendee referred to as 'devastated,' once again did not make the list. Also frustrated were Solano Avenue residents to the west of Arnold, residents of Mountain in the Fetters area, and everyone who has to drive such notably gnarly surfaces such as the first few blocks of Riverside from Petaluma to Grove Street.

Which brought into question just how the list is created, and what the criteria are for inclusion. The criteria, explained Hoevertsz, includes type of usage – residential or commuter – and the amount of traffic, presence of schools and fire houses, current condition and other design characteristics.

Remarking that she and her staff had driven every mile of every road in the district, and paid special attention to road complaints from constituents, Supervisor Gorin noted that funds for roads projects come 'from a patchwork of sources,' including the county's allocation of $24 million from its general fund for the Pavement Preservation Program over the two-year period and $10 million from the state gas tax (SB1), and $3 million from other sources.

The 1st District has the third most number of county road miles in the county. Of a total of 1368 miles in the county, the 5th District has 529, the 4th district – the north county to the Mendocino county line – has 332, and the 1st District has 259.

The numbers are measured as 'centerline miles,' regardless of roadway width or number of lanes. And they exclude the road miles in the towns and cities, including Santa Rosa or Sonoma. This would explain why the 3rd District has fewer than 20 miles of county roads: most of the asphalt is laid down in the City of Santa Rosa.

Although the county budgeted $24 million from its general fund for the Pavement Preservation Program over the two-year period, only 19 percent of that comes to the 1st District, or about $4.6 million. With all sources totaled, there is a budget of $37 million for the next two years of road work.

Of that, less than 20 percent, a little over $7 million, is headed for the 1st District. The reason is that funds are apportioned in the same percentage as roads for each district. Hoevertz said that the amount of money that comes from such sources as gas taxes does not keep up with rising costs of materials, and asked the handful of people in the spacious auditorium for ideas on how to solve their particular road problems, if their roads did not make the list.

One idea was a neighborhood funding program, similar to an HOA – a Road Maintenance District, with locally-applied fees to help maintain local roads. Hoevertz said something similar is already being tried in Rio Nido and a Rohnert Park neighborhood.

Someone else suggested a lottery – throw your favorite bad road into a hopper and draw one, or two, each year, for a luck-of-the-draw road repair.

'That's not a bad idea,' said the TPW director, though one can only imagine the uproar such a random selection would produce.

Hoevertz emphasized that there's also a road maintenance budget in his department, separate from the pavement replacement program, and encouraged people to report their road concerns on the SoCo Report It app, available for both Android and Apple.

Contract Christian at christian.kallen@sonomanews.com.