County allocates $13.5 million to road repairs; nothing for Healdsburg

Sonoma County supervisors last week “found” extra money in their budget to fix more roads over the next two years, adding to their recent “catch up” plans to address a roads infrastructure they admit has been neglected over the previous decade or longer.
The unanimous vote approving $13.5 million in one-time funding was based on a new Long Term Roads Plan presented by Susan Klassen, the county’s transportation and public works director. The report was ordered by the supervisors after their Measure A sales tax increase plan was soundly defeated by voters last June.
The new two years of temporary funding will come from delinquent property tax fines and from road impact fees paid by garbage haulers and gravel mining operations.
Added to about $23 million of general funds already budgeted, the plan seeks to pave and repair about 150 miles of roads through 2017.
The plan calls for fixing a total of 850 miles of roads in the next 10 years just to keep up with more severe infrastructure degradation and added expenses.
With the added short-term funds from last week, the county will still be  more than 500 miles short of this goal. The estimated cost to repair a mile of road and related infrastructure is $255,000.
Craig Harrison, who started Save Our Sonoma Roads in 2011 to campaign for better roads, said he was “delighted” the supervisors “came up with as much money as they did.”
He credited the current board for a “great leap forward” over past years’ road funding but cautioned: “We have to keep looking forward.”
The $14 million average of road spending over the next few years is below a $20 million minimum set in the new roads plan to avoid further deterioration and uncounted new expenses, he said.
“I think we’ve just bought ourselves some more time,” said Harrison, “but it’s going to take a long, long time before we ever see things getting better.”
North County Supervisor James Gore did not dispute that timeline. “This won’t fix the long term, but I think it reiterates our commitment to our roads and public infrastructure,” said Gore.
Elected just one year ago to his first term, Gore said he has “inherited” much of the roads plan and said he has criticized county staff for excluding portions of his district and other parts of the county.
Gore said he was particularly upset that Cloverdale and the most northern section of the county was left off the map in the new Long Term Roads Plan. “I have reached out to Cloverdale and I’ve heard their frustration,” said Gore.
Meanwhile, north county projects approved for the next two years include Chalk Hill and Faught roads east of Windsor and Slusser and Woolsey roads near the Sonoma County Airport. No Healdsburg-area roads are included in the plan.
With increased general fund spending, some 109 miles of county roads have been resurfaced in the last two years.
As a larger, semi-rural county, Sonoma County has more road miles and a smaller population than most other counties in California. Because of that, the county has received smaller portions of the state and federal gasoline taxes, averaging just $12.7 million in recent years. The bill to fix all 1,384 miles of county roads is now estimated at $954 million and will only go up as repairs lag behind overall needs.
None of these figures include roads or streets within the county’s nine incorporated cities.
Measure A would have added $20 million a year from a quarter-cent sales tax increase, with $8.7 million available to the county and the remaining $11.3 million split between the county’s nine incorporated cities.
The supervisors sought a “general use” tax increase instead of a “special use” to avoid requiring a two-thirds voter approval. In hindsight, that plan backfired as voters appeared not to trust their elected officials to not spend the money elsewhere, including on salaries.
“Well, the newfound money seems to confirm what everyone knew all along — that the money was always there and the supervisors just wanted to spend it on other projects,” said Dan Drummond, executive director for the Sonoma County Taxpayers Association, which led the opposition to Measure A last June.
Harrison’s Save Our Sonoma Roads did support Measure A as the “least bad of all the options,” he said. “We’re not a tax increase group but we think the county has a basic responsibility to maintain our infrastructure.”
Neither Harrison nor anyone else has suggested a viable long range solution to complete repair of the county’s roads. “We need to maintain our commitment to infrastructure investments, said fifth district supervisor Efren Carrillo. “We’ve adopted a long range plan, but unless the state and federal governments shift their formulas it’s (road condition improvements) just going to be incremental at best.”
Property taxes are the largest source of county funds, but few people understand that most of that money goes to schools, public safety and criminal justice systems with very little left for roads, Carrillo said.
The Long-Term Roads Plan also looked at other potential funding options with no favorable answers, including revisiting a future sales tax vote like Measure A. County taxpayers already pay a quarter-cent tax for roads and transportation under Measure M, passed in 2004 to fund Highway 101 widening, public transit projects and $1.8 million annually for local street repairs. Measure M expires in 2024.