San Diego officials say mid-January will be a watershed moment for solving one of the city’s most glaring and chronic problems: crumbling streets that damage quality of life in nearly every city neighborhood.
Officials plan simultaneously to release the most comprehensive evaluation ever conducted of city road quality and a long-awaited audit evaluating how well the city spends the many millions devoted each year to road repair.
The two documents are expected to paint an ugly picture of streets that have decayed dramatically in recent years and of inefficient repair efforts that should be handled more holistically and strategically.
But instead of being discouraged, city officials say they plan to treat the bad news as a call to action and a springboard to dramatically change how they approach street repair.
They say the new information shows that the city must evaluate its roads more frequently, spend significantly more money on repairs and make spending more consistent each year to allow better long-term planning.
Those ideas aren’t entirely new, and it’s no secret San Diego’s streets are in bad shape. Residents frequently complain about them, and last summer the county grand jury recommended the city boost funding for road repair and revamp planning efforts.
But city officials say the new evaluation and audit will bring extra clarity to the situation and should create a new sense of urgency.
Officials will also recommend bringing more road repair in-house instead of using mostly outside contractors. They say a relative lack of local paving contractors could be making bids less competitive and costing San Diego money.
They say a new analysis included with the pavement evaluation says that while there are steep start-up costs, in-house crews would eventually save money and make it easier to tackle the daunting backlog of crumbling streets.
“This is a really important milestone,” city transportation director Bethany Bezak said of the pavement evaluation, called a Pavement Condition Index.
“We will actually have information that will be broken down by every single different road type and what the condition is of those road types across the city,” she said. “This will be a pretty detailed report. Every single road segment will have a Pavement Condition Index rating tied to it.”
It will be the first time since the last comprehensive evaluation in 2016 that San Diego has a full picture of which streets need aggressive repairs like an asphalt overlay, and which need more minor repairs like a slurry seal.
“The longer you get away from doing those condition assessments, the more assumptions you need to make around the road conditions — rather than having actual known information,” Bezak said.
For that reason, city officials have committed this fall to conducting comprehensive evaluations at least once every four years, which is considered the industry standard.
They expect this evaluation to be far superior to the 2016 version, primarily because it was done by lasers instead of human analysts surveying each segment of road visually. That meant it could gauge the overall smoothness of roads, not just whether there are cracks or damaged pavement.
“We have more data than we’ve ever had on our roads, and it’s the best data you can really have — it’s not relying on sight,” Bezak said.
When the results are revealed next month, local residents will be able to see on the city’s website the condition of their street and any future plans for repairs.
Going without such detailed information for seven years has significantly hampered city efforts to efficiently make repairs and plan an overall strategy that prioritizes the most time-sensitive jobs, she said.
Because overlay work costs $1.7 million per mile and slurry seals only $200,000 per mile, it’s crucial for city officials to know which work is needed where.
“When we have a longer-term plan in place, it allows us to apply the right treatments for the pavement at the right times,” Bezak said. “When we can’t do that planning, then it’s harder for us to be cost-effective.”
And if a segment of road that needs an overlay doesn’t get it soon enough, the city could face the need to completely rebuild that segment at a cost of about $20 million per mile.
The audit is expected to show that the city is not spending its repair dollars as effectively as it could. The city auditor said his staff has already spent nearly 2,600 hours on the analysis — by far the most of any recent audit.
A county grand jury report last summer said San Diego’s road repair efforts are plagued by funding gaps, poor planning and weak transparency.
Bezak said it’s not a surprise the city could be getting more bang for its buck, blaming the problem on inconsistent funding year over year.
Because road repair is funded primarily by the city’s volatile and tax-reliant general fund, it has bounced up and down significantly in recent years.
San Diego spent more than $125 million on road repair in fiscal years 2012, 2016 and 2018, but less than $80 million in fiscal years 2014, 2020, 2021 and 2023. Spending shot up to $140 million this fiscal year, but Bezak said consistency is needed.
“The inconsistent money does not set our team up for success, because it doesn’t allow us to manage pavement like an asset,” she said. “It’s also hard for the city team to scale up and scale back.”
But she said an even bigger and more stark takeaway from the new evaluation might be that the city is simply spending far too little on road repair, regardless of consistency.
The 2016 survey found the average condition of city streets was above the “good” threshold — defined as a rating of 70 or above. The average condition had climbed from 58.9 in 2011 to 71.5 in 2016.
City officials won’t reveal how low the overall rating of San Diego’s streets has fallen until the finished report is ready, but they’ve said several times that it will be a significant drop.
Randy Wilde, a senior policy adviser to Mayor Todd Gloria, said the new rating shows that San Diego must spend significantly more than it has even during the years on the high end of the scale.
“We are well below 70, so it is a significant long-term investment that we’re looking at,” Wilde said.
A potential source of additional road repair money is a one-cent local sales tax surcharge city officials have been considering. If placed on the ballot and approved by city voters in November, it could add $400 million a year to the city’s roughly $2 billion general fund.
Wilde said the city’s new overall pavement number won’t be shockingly low.
“I’m not running around in circles with my arms waving,” he said. “At least we will know what it is.”
One factor that could make the rating lower than it might otherwise be is that much of the survey work took place last spring, when heavy rains were creating thousands of potholes across the city, officials said.
Bezak said she hopes the new rating will convince city leaders to spend more on road repair. And she said the potential of getting more for their money with in-house crews could help.
Many smaller cities don’t have enough road repair work to warrant full-time, dedicated city crews. But some larger cities, including Los Angeles, have enough work for that approach to make financial sense.
Bezak said a new analysis shows it could work in San Diego, but that it couldn’t happen for a few years and would come with significant start-up costs.
It would take time because the city would have to hire many workers for the crew, buy a wide range of paving equipment and find storage and work space for the crew.
City crews already handle pothole repairs and some smaller paving jobs, but Bezak is talking about adding a crew that could do overlay work.
