County roads are terrible. Public Works hatches a plan to fix them.

Another storm, another series of setbacks to Monterey County’s road conditions.

You don’t need an engineering degree to see the immediate damage from flooding, fallen limbs and debris covering roadways. Potholes are now small ponds.

But the deteriorated conditions go back to before this year’s storms or last year’s storms.

Back in 2020, County Supervisor Mary Adams and then-County Supervisor John Phillips (since retired) asked county staff to come up with a plan to get county roads up to a standard of “fair” within 10 years. Sounds like a pretty modest goal.

That is, until you start measuring it. At that time, there was an estimated $1.2 billion worth of deferred maintenance for the county’s 175 bridges and 1,257 miles of county-maintained roads. That’s enough miles, Randy Ishii is fond of pointing out, to reach one-third of the way across the United States.

Ishii is director of the Monterey County Department of Public Works, Facilities and Parks, and has been tasked with coming up with a strategy to get all of those roads from “poor” to “fair” based on a standardized pavement quality index.

Since the board referral in 2020, things have largely gotten worse thanks to the weather. In the first four months of 2023, there were 666 requests to the County for pothole repairs, three times more than the previous year. In the first six months of 2023, there were 24 legal claims filed for pothole-related damage, compared to 11 in all of 2022.

But Ishii today sounds optimistic about a plan to meet the modest goal of “fair,” and also about a whole new framework for how the county pays for road maintenance. On Jan. 31, the Board of Supervisors voted 5-0 to approve a new methodology for how we pay for road repairs.

The Local Road Rehabilitation Program 2.0 is a new formula championed by Ishii. Instead of issuing about $66 million in bonds that would need to be paid back over time – with interest, to the tune of a whopping $43.3 million in plan 1.0 – version 2.0 will use what is known as a “pay-as-you-go” formula.

The idea calls for a mix of funding sources. One is to bring back a dedicated chunk (25 percent) of the county’s transient-occupancy tax for roads. Funds from local transportation sales tax Measure X (roughly $7.5 million per year) and the state gas tax will go toward major arterial roads – both of Monterey County’s biggest industries, agriculture and tourism, strain road conditions.

As far as prioritizing, the county will continue with a pilot program in communities including Spreckels, Aromas, Bradley and San Ardo – and down the road, such unincorporated communities will need to agree to finance some of their own ongoing maintenance needs through a Prop. 218 process.

It’s a smart new formula to spread out the cost and avoid massive interest payments for bonds. But of course it comes with unknowns. Specifically, gas tax revenue is on a downward trend and as we transition to electric vehicles, it’s an old model that will generate less and less revenue. “It’s a challenge for all of us,” Ishii says of that statewide funding dilemma.

Road projects are immensely expensive, largely for reasons beyond the county’s control – fuel, labor, materials costs. Consider the stretch of Harkins Road and Hunter Lane in Spreckels that were recently repaved, after getting chewed up by heavy agricultural use. Crews went at least 1 foot deeper than the old asphalt, pulverizing and recycling that material. Hot mix asphalt was then spread on top for a smooth new surface. Total cost: $7.1 million, for 2.9 miles of road. This is about $2.4 million per mile.

The road reconstruction average is closer to $2 million per mile. Meanwhile, there are lower-cost maintenance approaches – like overlay “mill-and-fill,” for $1 million a mile, or “chip seal” for $250,00-$300,000 per mile that can extend the life of a road.

The county ordered two “hot trucks” pre-pandemic, and the first one finally arrived after a delay. These vehicles ($270,000 each) can deliver the same hot-mix asphalt that is used in brand-new roads to potholes, hopefully offering longer-lasting fixes.

“We are trying to find newer and more efficient ways of doing our business,” Ishii says. Still, he offers some caution: “We should temper and set our expectations appropriately.”

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@mcweekly.com.