Taylor residents will see improvements to 38 additional road segments over the next four months. City Council approved the latest recommendation from Public Works to continue the 2023-24 Level Up Phase 1 program.
“We have a three-prong street program. The ‘level up’ is our most basic level of care. It’s an inch to an inch-and-a-half of asphalt that’s just an overlay. All it’s designed for is help to improve the ride. In front of your house if you’ve got hundreds of potholes and you get a level up, you’re going to be more level,” Public Works Director Jim Gray told City Council at the Thursday meeting.
The Public Works Department has been selecting streets for the level up procedure based on a Pavement Condition Index score. Roads with a PCI of zero through 20 have been fixed over the last few years. This year’s program is fixing roads that have a PCI score of 21 through a portion of those with a score of 23. According to city data, the repairs will take approximately 120 days and cost around $400,000.
The index refers to the width, number and type of cracks in a road as measured by cameras on a profiling van. The van also collects data about a street’s bumpiness or roughness for driving.
Leveling up adds asphalt on top of a street that may be in bad shape underneath, so the fix is only expected to last from one to three years. But in the meantime, according to city staff, it decreases the number of potholes and allows additional city time and resources to be devoted to other streets.
Councilman Dwayne Ariola said he approved of the method of choosing which streets to fix using the PCI.
“These aren’t subjective, they are objective with machinery that is measuring stuff and we are constantly upgrading that,” Ariola said. “When you start getting into choosing and varying from this list we’ve seen in the past it causes a fracas among everybody and it becomes political.”
Councilman Robert Garcia commented that the list of 38 street segments to level up covered many of the streets that he saw being cited as problematic by the public on social media.
One street that has been recently called out on social media for needing repairs is Wabash Street. It is not on the current list to be leveled up. Gray reported that Wabash has had four segments in the level up program, with asphalt being applied on April 27, 2021, May 4, 2021, July 7, 2022 and May 19, 2023. A total of about $20,500 was spent on material costs for those repairs.
The public works director reminded the council that the repairs are done by segments, not by whole streets or blocks, though they hope to work on longer segments in the next phase of the project.
“About 60% of our streets are failed,” Gray said. “(PCI is) a way to work through the street programs in a scientific and objective way.”
Working in segments explains why street repairs can seem to stop in mid-block, Gray explained.
“We do have lots and lots of failed streets and it’s going to take years to get those done,” Garcia said. “Maybe in the future we can discuss having a large bond put to the voters to actually make a huge dent in fixing the streets.”
