San Jose's DOT Director discusses the state of the city's roadways and how to repair them

Last month the City of San Jose's Director of the Department of Transportation, Hans Larsen spoke to a full crowd of residents at the monthly Willow Glen Neighborhood Association meeting. Hans gave a presentation outlining some of the many challenges facing his department given the city's fiscal constraints. San Jose with a population just now surpassing 1,000,000 residents currently has 4,182 lanes miles of roadway to maintain.

The bill to fix this amount of roadway is now about $100,000,000 per year or $1,000,000,000  (thats $1 Billion) over 10 years. With the cities general fund being decimated by pension costs, only $2-3 million is the most that is available from this source. Federal, state, and regional monies are available but this will only total around $15 million per year. Of this $15 million $5 million dollars are proceeds from last November's Measure B that was passed by Santa Clara County voters. Funds from this measure will be available in the next fiscal year. This fee which is a flat $10 charge, is collected from every registered vehicle. The proceeds from the fee will be apportioned to Santa Clara County Cities (based on population and amount of roadway) as well as to the county's Roads Division. San Jose portion per year is expected to be at around $5 million.

This underfunding of repairs and maintenance is estimated to contribute to the growing backlog of necessary maintenance. Yesterday Director Larsen presented this scenario to the San Jose City Council urging the city to inialize a parcel tax to fund the growing gap in the maintainence deficit.  The proposal is to raise an additional $60 million over 10 years by way of a parcel tax. The city will be closely watching San Francisco's November 2011 election to guage that city's appetite for increased spending on roadways. The city of San Francisco is putting Measure B (the Road Repaving and Street Safety Bond) on the ballot to improve their own roadways and finance sizeable streetscapes as well.  Director Larsen's propsed parcel tax is estimated to average $300 to $400 per parcel.

San Jose mulls new parcel tax to fix city streets (San Jose Mercury News October 26, 2011)

San Jose Department of Transportation presentation to the Willow Glen Neighborhood Assn.

Originally a Power Point Presentation it has been uploaded as a pdf file with some mistakes in rendering the image.

MTC - The Pothole Report: Can the Bay Area Have Better Roads?

California State Propostion 42 - March 5, 2002 (passed 69.1%)

Santa Clara County Vehicle Registration Fee - Measure B (passed 51.93%)

San Francisco upcoming election for Measure B (San Francisco Department of Public Works)