Rey Mashayekhi here, thinking about one of the longest-running public issues in Monterey County and what can be done to address it.
At his swearing-in to the county Board of Supervisors in January, Glenn Church, who represents the North County area, reflected on the key issues facing the local government dating back to when his father, Warren, served on the board in the 1960s and 1970s.
“I look back at the issues that were there 50 years ago—and they were housing, and water, and roads and land use,” he said. “And then I look around now at the issues we face—and it’s housing, it’s water, it’s roads, it’s land use. And while I like to be optimistic that we’ll be able to address some of these [challenges], somehow I have a hunch that 50 years from now, it’ll still be housing, and water, and land use, and roads.”
Roads, in particular, have been the subject of a couple of stories I’ve written in recent weeks that highlight perhaps the most visible and persistently frustrating public infrastructure matter in Monterey County.In this week’s edition of the Weekly, I highlighted rising resident complaints about potholes; in the first four-plus months of this year, the county received nearly three times as many requests to patch up roads than it did in the same period last year.
There’s also been a sharp increase in legal claims filed against the county by drivers seeking compensation for damage caused to their vehicles by potholes. The county has already received 24 such claims and counting this year, according to the Monterey County Counsel’s office—more than double the amount filed in all of 2022. (Unfortunately for those drivers, the county rejected every single one of the complaints on legal grounds and hasn’t had to pay a penny.)
County Public Works Director Randell Ishii tells me that this winter’s torrential storms are partially at fault for the deteriorating condition of county roads, noting that maintenance crews have been “working extended hours and weekend shifts” to fix as many as possible. But there’s only so much that Ishii and his teams at the Department of Public Works, Facilities and Parks can do, and it’s clear that this is a much deeper issue that will require a significant amount of resources and investment to address.
The county currently faces an estimated $1.5 billion backlog of “long-term deferred maintenance for roads and bridges,” Ishii notes. On the pavement condition index (PCI) scale—developed by civil engineers as a standardized measure of road conditions—Monterey County’s roads had an average PCI score of 48, or a “poor” grade, on a scale of 0 to 100, according to a 2020 county report. That report found that the county would need to invest $600 million over 10 years to improve its roads up to a “fair” PCI score of 70.
Unfortunately, that kind of expenditure would approximately double the county’s current budget for roads and bridges. It’s the kind of shortfall that requires creative solutions: Last week, I reported on a new public-private partnership model that the county is using that allows private stakeholders to finance road repairs in order to expedite the work. The first-ever such partnership is with Carmel Valley’s Fox Creek Ranch, which has arranged a $2.9 million donation through the Silicon Valley Community Foundation to repave a 2.7-mile stretch of East Carmel Valley Road that accesses the ranch. The work is expected to begin by September.
There are naturally questions that arise around such an arrangement—like whether it’s right for the county to accept private dollars on behalf of wealthy Carmel Valley landowners to prioritize fixing relatively lightly trafficked, scenic country roads. On the other hand, East Carmel Valley Road is a public road open to all, and one that’s long been in desperate need of repair—work that will now be accelerated by the private donation.
Still, it’s almost certainly not an approach capable of improving all 1,200-plus miles of Monterey County roads to where they need to be. That will require more root-and-branch solutions, and a lot more money. Otherwise, as Church noted, we’ll likely still be frustrated by the state of our roads 50 years from now.