I'm going to say a little about Proposition 411, a half-cent sales tax that Tucson voters approved in 2022, how our roads got to where they are, and then give a little bit of an overarching view of the things Tucson is doing about them. Fifty-eight percent of our streets are in mediocre or poor condition. That's on the major streets network. I'd argue that, in the local streets, it's even worse. The Trip Research Group out of Washington, DC, estimates that Arizonans pay about $880 a year more on maintenance of their vehicles because of the condition of our roads and the city often has to pay for that damage.
What did our streets look like before Proposition 411? More than 70 percent of our streets in Tucson were in very poor condition, or worse.
We knew in 2008 that our streets were going downhill at least in part due to the recession. In 2013 the City Council put before the voters Proposition 409 which was for $100 million of general fund money to be raised through bonds because we were still struggling because revenues were not coming back yet. But Prop 409 just wasn't enough. Our road conditions continued to decline.
In 2018, voters approved Proposition 101 which was the first time we've had a half-cent sales tax for road recovery. Actually 60 percent of that money went to the police and fire departments because they were also struggling. But the other 40 percent got us to the point where road conditions were kind of static, not getting worse, nor better.
With Proposition 411, 80 percent is devoted to getting our neighborhood streets back into shape. The other 20 percent is for safety improvements.
So, how did we get here? Over time, roads deteriorate with use and weather. They deteriorate very slowly initially and can be maintained at fairly low cost if we do it early in their life cycle. You can keep a good road good at a whole lot less cost than what it costs to bring a bad road back up.
But, without maintenance, road conditions began to fall off precipitously. We started investing in them, but we just couldn’t keep up. We just didn’t have the resources. It really took a major investment to start bringing the roads back.
Then, when Proposition 411 passed, we had to come up with a plan for how to move forward.
We set up the Independent Oversight and Accountability Commission and started to work on road recovery. Tucson has about 26 million square yards of asphalt paving in our neighborhoods and we set about trying to tackle it systematically.
We started with about 2.8 million square yards of resurfacing work. When I talk about resurfacing, we've got a couple of different ways of doing it.
Most people think of resurfacing in terms of the mill-and-fill operations you may be seeing around town. A milling machine physically grinds the asphalt down a couple of inches and deposits the millings into a dump truck. Then, after workers have compacted the base, they put down new asphalt. That's actually the dominant way we're resurfacing right now.
But our initial forecasts were that, even with a half cent sales tax over 10 years, we wouldn’t be able to get everything treated but we also had a commitment to the public that we would treat every road in town.
So we did some treatments that could extend life rather than replace the pavement. Right now, we're at about 70/30 split between milling and filling our pavements and doing what we call a multi-surface treatment for to preserve the roadways that are in better condition.
If the base is still intact, we do a multi-surface treatment, where we'll start out with spraying hot liquid asphalt rubber. It's a different product than the chip sealing of the past. About 20 percent of the product we're spraying is ground-up used tires from Los Reales. We're doing a lot of work with our own products. At Los Reales, we crush those millings, separate them, produce our own chips and use our own products for the micro-surfacing. The micro-surfacing material comes out of a truck that mixes asphalt emulsions, some polymers and aggregates, and then distributes it.
This is Blackwood over near McCormick Park. On the left hand side, you see the road that had been chip sealed, and then on the right hand side, you see where we've capped it with the micro-surface product.
As we were trying to figure out how we're going to get our streets up to snuff, we decided to identify the condition of the roadways and the neighborhoods to make sure that we were proportional around the city, and not have ward representation. All of our elected officials are always advocating for their own neighborhoods. We needed to make sure that we were distributing the work evenly so that no parts of the city were being left behind. But not every ward is the same. All wards have about the same population, but Ward Three has the smallest amount of roads while Ward Six has 50 percent more.
We also knew that the smartest investment that we could make was in the roads in the best shape. That’s the lowest life-cycle cost approach, but we knew that wouldn’t sit well with the public to see that the better streets were being treated while the worst ones weren’t.
So we looked at using the lowest pavement condition as being the roads that we would start with first, and then we would look at equity as a modifier when deciding which streets and neighborhoods we would do. We chose to favor the most disinvested neighborhoods, but we retained 7 percent of our budget for treatment to keep the good roads good.
We have treated a little more than 41 percent of our streets in a little less than four years into the program. We have another five percent under contract right now. So we are actually ahead of schedule.
We're a lot better off than we were four years ago. We had a target of trying to get our overall condition index throughout the city to between the fair and good over ten years. That score would be 70. Our current score is 60.95 after the first four years.
We also knew that it was not just the local streets that were failing, but also our collector network. Those are the roads that collect from the neighborhoods and distribute to the arterials.
We have a five-year program for those and we're well on our way to delivering on those projects
The arterials are an area that we've had some challenges with as well. Pothole claims is one of the metrics that I watch. We saw them going down, but now they're going back up again. That's because we're seeing a lot of damage on our arterial roads that we don't have an identified funding source to repair.
So that’s one of the things we put into the Regional Transportation Authority plan.
This coming year we’ll be redoing Irvington Road, basically between Kolb and Houghton. That project is my biggest thorn. We have a lot of pothole claims: it's in really bad shape. It’s really a four-to-five-mile-per-hour road. If you hit a pothole as a higher speed, you're gonna damage your vehicle, and we have to pay for that.
Also Silverbell between Grant Road and Saint Mary's will be repaved. That'll probably be our second project. And then Swan Road from Speedway to River. Those are in my program for Fiscal Year 2027.
We also have a lot of work that we're continuing on the RTA plan that was adopted back in 2006. There've been some slowdowns as we've had to work through some issues with the Regional Transportation Organization and other agencies, but we're now moving forward positively. Some of you may be familiar with the west end of Grant Road, where you're going under the railroad. That is going to be a painful project anyway we do it but we’ll try to do it in the most sensible, cheapest, and most effective way we can. We closed Grant Road at the Union Pacific Railroad at the end of school so that prevents Grant from tying into Interstate 10 for now. We're going to have it back open when school starts again. Hopefully, when we reopen it, especially before the casino opens, that'll make a big reduction in the delays that we see there.
The other big project that we’ve recently broken ground on is the 22nd Street viaduct that is also now closed. We could have done one bridge at a time, but that really didn't make sense. It would have taken probably the better part of 10 years. This way the project is going to take us about three and a half.
One of the challenges that we have is that sometimes it makes sense to add in other layers as we do a project. In the case of Limberlost, we’re going to add in sidewalks and street lighting and there is going be reconfiguring of the lanes so that there'll be better protected bike lanes.
Houghton Road has been an enormous project for us because of all the utilities. When you think about it, a lot of our utilities come up that corridor. Many of our data lines, power, water, gas, sewer, storm drains. A lot of it is hidden, but it’s got to be relocated or expanded as the east side housing increases so that makes it seem like a lot of time with little happening, but that work has to be done before the paving.
TEP has done a lot of their relocation work, but they won't be done until Christmas because they have to stop now and redeploy their forces to be prepared for emergency outages during the monsoon season.
Steve Pageau: Jim has worked everywhere in our region so he knows what is going on everywhere. So it's great that he's now with the City of Tucson. It's been a pleasure working with him and having his help getting through the delays on the Downtown Links Project. I appreciate him coming here this morning to let you know that we've not been standing around waiting for things to get better.
Thank you, Jim, for being here today and for the work you are doing on our streets.
