The north end of Sunset Ridge Drive reveals significant road damage, including cracking, uneven patches and loose gravel. (photo by Cynthia Kurose)
City continues road repairs
Mayor Kevin Faulconer pledged, in 2015, to fix 1,000 miles of streets in five years. While that goal is currently tracking ahead of schedule, with 800 miles of repairs completed in fewer than three years, many Scripps Ranch residents remain curious about when the damaged roads around their homes will receive the attention they need.
Alma Do, a homeowner who lives near the top of Sunset Ridge Drive, expressed the frustration that both she and her husband share.
“Sunset Ridge Drive has horrible roads. My husband keeps asking when it will get fixed and not just patched up. As a busy road, it sees a lot of wear and tear and needs to get repaved,” Do said.
Discussions in online message boards in Scripps Ranch have also, for some time, referenced potholes and road damage that puts added stress on residents’ vehicles.
“There’s so much extra wear and tear on our vehicles these days because of the uneven road conditions,” read a post by Denise Pollak last September.
More recently, Sylvia Garcia Borgo posted a more optimistic comment, trying to find the silver lining.
“I’ve tried to avoid the problem roads – the plus side is I’ve gotten to know the smaller streets of SR as I slowly weave through the neighborhood,” she wrote.
In a letter from Mayor Faulconer addressed to San Diegans on April 4, he acknowledged that “San Diego’s roads were neglected for far too long.”
While his letter cited the significant progress made toward his promised 1,000 miles of road repairs in five years, he also empathized, “I know those numbers may not mean much if you’re still waiting for your street to be fixed. We know we still have a lot of work to do. And that’s why we’re not slowing down,” he wrote.
Quinton Grounds, community representative for District 5 City Councilman Mark Kersey, explained how the prioritization works for which city streets receive attention first. The order in which streets are repaired is determined by the “Overall Condition Index (OCI), a number score that’s collected through a scientific evaluation of each and every street in the City,” Grounds wrote in an email.
The OCI is determined by a consulting firm that physically drives every road in the city with special sensors and visual-capture equipment on their trucks to assess the general condition of the road. This information, aggregated with data about street traffic, age and rate of maintenance, allows the experts to compile a score of 0-100, which places streets in categories of good, fair and poor, and also “helps the City prioritize their slurrying and repaving efforts,” Grounds wrote.
According to Councilman Kersey, with more than 2,800 miles of road in San Diego, “you have to balance because there’s limited resources. For starters, slurry sealing is far less expensive. You can slurry seal for $25,000-$50,000 per mile. Whereas that same mile of asphalt overlay (repaving) costs half a million,” he said.
Because a slurry seal is simply not effective for a road in truly poor condition due to years of neglect, “you have to make decisions about how you’re going to allocate those resources,” Kersey added. “You basically have to allocate to both. We’re going to do maintenance as well as overlay.”
Kersey shared a bit of good news on the topic of resources for infrastructure, which, as chair of the Council’s Infrastructure Committee, is one of his key priorities.
“The Mayor just released yesterday (April 11), for fiscal year starting July 1, we will have our largest capital budget ever, meaning infrastructure projects,” he said. “Obviously, not all of that is road repair, but there’s a good chunk of that in there.”
While unrelated to the City-led road repair efforts, the SDG&E “Sycamore to Penasquitos 230-kilovolt transmission line project” currently underway on Pomerado Road and Stonebridge Parkway is also a major point of concern among Scripps Ranch residents. According to the utility company, completion of the project, including repair of the road, is expected by June 30. Kersey confirmed that SDG&E is “absolutely on the hook for repaving the road” affected by the project.
Updated information on road repairs can be found at streets.sandiego.gov.