Mapping out Salinas roads helps prioritize repairs

Salinas Public Works is getting ready to spend millions of dollars to repair city streets over the next three years.

On Tuesday, Acting Public Works Director Don Reynolds introduced to council the Pavement Management System. It mapped out every road in Salinas to look at its overall condition, including any pothole problems, painting, or just overall maintenance needs.

The city of Salinas has more than 290 miles worth of roads and streets and a lot of them need to be repaired.

We asked drivers in Salinas what they thought the worst roads were.

“There’s Market Street, and the street that I live on, on Atherton Way,” said Salinas resident, Bill Freeman.

Mae Green of Salinas said, “I think the roads that need working on is Central and a lot of the roads that go into the area of North Salinas.”

The pavement management system help them prioritize.

“Provides a map of all the city streets and it shows which streets are in red (bad condition), which streets are newer (in blue) condition and as you can imagine, there’s more red and yellow in the south side of Salinas because it’s the older part of the city and then across the top is this band of blue streets up in Creekbridge and the newer neighborhoods,” Reynolds said.

The software is data driven, meaning some of the worst streets will be completely overhauled while better ones will just be maintained.

Each district will get work done, not just one or the other.

The City of Salinas has 38 capital improvement projects in the works. Some of them are big ones like the Boronda Road expansion, the Laurel Drive extension and improvements on Bardin Road but there are others in the mix too.

Reynolds said, “We’re going out to Circle Drive, and that’s one that was either orange or red on our list, Circle and Sanborn. We’re going to be looking at slurry and recover all of that, that’s a high priority. We need to re-slurry and recover Natividad and Constitution, so those are on our priority list.”

The city is getting a lot of the money from taxpayers. There’s voter approved Measure X that was the TAMC sales tax increase and SB 1, the gas tax that kicked in last fall.

Green said, “Taxpayer dollars are definitely at work if you decide to just accept what they’re billed for.”

“You know if they’re using them for helping everyone, which they are, it’ll help fix the roads everyone drives on every day,” said Freeman.

The city hopes to have $100 million worth of projects done in the next three years, but even then it won’t be enough. They are still looking at a deficit of $25 million. They hope to offset that with federal help and grants.