SAN BENITO — City crews are gearing up to launch a $700,000 project aimed at paving 20 potholed streets scattered across town.
This year, two crews will be working on about 84 blocks of streets after the city bought a new paving machine, City Manager Manuel De La Rosa said.
This past week, city commissioners approved a new list of 20 streets for the project.
“I’m just happy to hear we’re ready to go,” City Commissioner Rene Garcia said during a meeting Tuesday. “We’re going to have two crews. We need to get going.”
For decades, residents have cursed San Benito’s pockmarked streets as one of the biggest problems facing the city, blaming the deep potholes for gouging their cars’ wheels and hammering suspensions.
While many of the city’s past administrations have poured millions into patching and paving city blocks, too many years of neglect have made catching up harder and harder with every season of rain, traffic and decay.
Now, the city’s low tax base makes it a bigger challenge than ever to pave the broken streets crisscrossing nearly every block in town.
“Historically, a lot of our streets in our community need attention,” De La Rosa said.
Crews to pave most streets this year
During the meeting, De La Rosa said Public Works Director David Vasquez helped tap the streets for the project.
“We took some of your comments. We said, ‘Look, we’re going to look at every part of town and try to pick a few streets out of each part of town,’” De La Rosa told commissioners. “So we compiled a list of some of the streets that need to be addressed in various parts of town. We want streets picked in every part of town — what you determine to be the worst streets. We were given very specific directions by the city commission to fix potholes.”
De La Rosa said he expects Vasquez’s crews to complete most of the project during the fiscal year.
“He actually put a list based on historically what we can do, and we just got the second paver delivered a couple of days ago so it’s getting ready to go into the field,” he said. “So we’ll have two different crews working. We’re pushing hard on this to try to get it done as much this fiscal year.”
Criteria
Vasquez, the city’s new public works director, said criteria used to pick streets included the condition of utility lines running under the pavement.
“Factors that went into this were whether we have dilapidated or aged systems underneath, which would be your water, wastewater,” he said, adding it takes crews two to three days to pave seven blocks of streets. “There’s less breakage in those areas, there’s less curbing — as we mentioned, it does take time for us to do that.”
Meanwhile, Commissioner Pete Galvan suggested officials adopt the Rubric criteria system while including factors such as traffic volume and school proximity when tapping streets for repair.
“I wanted to include a Rubric system — a point system to be more objective,” he stated after the meeting.
100 streets on master list
At City Hall, officials have been working with lists citing about 100 streets for repair.
On the list, streets are not prioritized, they said.
“Lists tend to confuse people,” De La Rosa told commissioners. “The more lists you generate, and it gets out, because it’s a working instrument, they think it’s gospel, and it’s not. I hate numbers. Numbers don’t mean anything.”
In response, Commissioner Rene Villafranco said he wants to get that message out to residents.
“That’s what we should emphasize — that this list is not in that order,” he said. “It’s just the number of streets that staff has targeted for repairs.”
Last year, commissioners funded a $1 million street project.
To fund the project, De La Rosa pulled $550,000 from the city’s $4 million reserve, bolstering the annual $450,000 street repair account to come up with the $1 million price tag.
