In an announcement that only surprised the members of City Council, City Staff yesterday revealed that the streets in El Paso are in bad shape. From the El Paso Times,
After nearly five years of back and forth on what streets need fixing, the city will have to come up with an additional $45 million to reconstruct five roads now listed as being in need of critical repairs — and will conduct a new study to prioritize needs.
The City Council on Monday authorized staff to find funding for the five streets, and also approved a $750,000 citywide assessment to replace data from a 2008 study known as the Pavement Management Index. That index was used to prioritize streets and funding under the $218 million Streets Capital Improvement Program approved by council in 2012.
According to the article, the streets in my neighborhood aren’t some of the ones that need fixing.
Probably because my neighbors don’t vote.
Meanwhile, what is the point of having a Street Department, if they can’t tell us what streets need work? What the hell do they do, anyway? On another subject, I noticed recently that the city no longer takes care of traffic lights, as I always see Tri-State Electric trucks parked where work is being done.
Duh is the perfect title for this article. The city is spending 10 million of our own money and 90 million in grant money to build a trolley to somewhere yet can’t fix the streets. Within 5 years the city will pass a Certificate of Obligation (no voter approval needed) to raise taxes to fund street repairs while the trolley gobbles up the taxes.
Tolbert vilifies Larry Romero for repairing streets that are falling apart, yet what has Tolbert done for District 2’s streets? The person who gets things done gets knocked down because he makes others look bad. Now we get another assessment but no repairs.
So due to all the construction and heavy truck traffic the streets (neglect) are worse…DUH !