TRAVERSE CITY — Road quality in Traverse City is improving, but current assessments show that a $44 million gap stands between the city’s objectives and where road quality stands today.
During a July 13 study session, asset management and GIS analyst Christine Black updated commissioners on the Pavement Asset Management Plan.
While commissioner Laura Ness acknowledged the “staggering” $44 million funding gap, Black pointed out that despite Traverse City’s need for improved road conditions, the area is “actually doing pretty well” compared to the statewide average.
According to Black’s presentation, 83% of the region’s major roads are in good or fair condition, compared to a 69% statewide average; with 74.8% of local roads are in good or fair condition, compared to a 57% statewide average.
“The State of Michigan has acknowledged that the City of Traverse City has advanced in its asset management efforts — especially when compared to other municipalities across the atate,” City Manager Benjamin Marentette said.
Part of the plan entails meeting a specific road quality goal: 50% of all major and local roads should be kept in good condition, 40% in fair condition, and 10% in poor condition.
As of Monday’s report, only 29% of city major roads are in good condition, 54% are in fair condition, and 17% are in poor condition.
Furthermore, 30% of local roads are in good condition and 45% are in fair condition, while 25% remain in poor condition.
Black said that more funding can be directed toward preservation rather than reconstruction with planned investments.
Traverse City maintains 78.4 miles of major and local roads, not including alleys, which do not receive state funding.
The city also lacks a funding mechanism for stormwater management, so that incurs additional costs not included in the management plan, Black pointed out.
“We need to be doing the right type of pavement treatments at the right times,” she said. “If we can’t do that, [roads] will keep falling. Lifecycle costs also rise, especially when you have to do reconstruction, [which] is vastly more expensive than our treatments.”
One investment involves a common practice called crack sealing, a preservation treatment that prevents water from infiltrating the roadbed, thus preventing potholes and increasing lifespan.
“All of our roads have a 25- to 30-year lifespan,” Black said. “We can increase that if we do some preventative maintenance in the meantime.”
Referencing the report’s gap analysis, Black recommended that an additional 13 miles of major roads be cracksealed (costing approximately $14,252,000); along with 22 additional miles of local roads (approximately $29,989,000) — approximately $44,241,000.
That totals 44 miles, including 35 miles of road that Black said were “missed” during last year’s crack-sealing efforts.
Black went on to discuss the need for additional treatments like cape sealing and mill and fills, which she said are also in order.
“Every single thing that gets put in front of us, from roads to striping to [winter sidewalk clearing], are all things everybody wants to make sure we do,” Mayor Amy Shamroe said. “But at the end of the day those come with very big price tags. I think that is the hard part about being an elected official, about our departments, and about putting together a city budget. We all want to fund these things to the max, but at the end of the day we only have a certain amount of money in the pool that we have to work with.”
“By underinvesting [in road treatments] we risk higher cost down the road if we end up with reconstructions instead of our pavement preservation projects,” Black said. “[That would] create a massive backlog of those reconstruction projects.”
Black pointed out that Monroe Avenue’s recent .6 miles of road construction cost $3 to $4 million.
“If you figure that’s how much it costs to [reconstruct] less than a mile of road, that’s a lot [of money],” Black said, warning that the city’s “middle-of-the-road” projects are running out, and that “We are going to end up with total reconstructions if we don’t start trying to keep the ones that are in fair [condition] out of the poor [condition] category.”
Black said annual condition assessment will continue, along with continued coordination of roadway and utility investments, annually updated project priorities, progress monitoring toward condition goals, and continuing to identify funding sources and level of service.
Shamroe expressed hope that the $44 million road goals price tag reminds people “That these maintenance road projects save us millions of dollars down the line as we try to figure out how we are going to [afford] some of these larger [reconstruction] projects that will cost us a $1 million or more, or hundreds of thousands of dollars when we do a mill and fill.”
The mayor added that using city equipment and staff for smaller mill and fills helped achieve lower project costs over the last year.
Since Monday’s meeting was a study session, no actions were taken.