City Council eyes road repairs
Funds from SB 1 will affect Copper Hill Drive, McBean Parkway, Rye Canyon Road and Valencia Boulevard
Santa Clarita City Council approved several million dollars in allocated state funds from Senate Bill 1, which calls for road repairs throughout the state of California, into a capital improvement program.
Currently, the city has identified projects using these funds that will primarily focus on the Overlay and Slurry Seal program, which will affect updates to the roads Copper Hill Drive, McBean Parkway, Rye Canyon Road and Valencia Boulevard.
Caldera Cruz, general services manager at the city, said that the bill focuses on deferred maintenance of the roads. Under the bill, the city will receive rehabilitation account funds that will increase the budget by $3.5 million.
The first distribution of funds was in January 2018, when the program known as the Road Maintenance Rehabilitation Account began to develop the city’s roads last year, Cruz said.
Overlay is defined as preventative surfacing of the streets, where some portion of the asphalt is deteriorating and developers fix it before it rots further, said city assistant engineer Frank Lujan.
Senate Bill 1, otherwise known as the Road Repair and Accountability Act of 2017, was passed by the Legislature in April 2017. The city at the time used its Five-Year Pavement Preservation program to develop the list of projects that will receive funding.
The current projects are pending approval by the California Transportation Commission, which will approve the list and distribute the $3.5 million, starting in January 2019.