Out of order: Disruptions foil street paving plan
STAMFORD — It used to be that the people who shouted the loudest got their roads paved.
Then Mayor David Martin spent $144,000 to hire a company that drove a truck on all 1,200 streets in the city, trailering equipment that measured surface stability. The company used the data to rank the streets by condition.
Four years later, many of the worstranked streets are not fixed. But some of the higherranked ones have been repaired.
This week members of the Board of Representatives’ Operations Committee asked why.
“Wire Mill Road in my district is still in the same place on the list,” which is No. 77, Rep. Susan Nabel, D20, told Road Maintenance Supervisor Thomas Turk during Tuesday’s meeting. “It doesn’t move up or down.”
“Shouldn’t we expect that the paving schedule matches the ranking?” asked Rep. David Watkins, R1.
No, Turk said. “There are X factors in every direction,” he said.
The factors are interlacing and often unpredictable, Turk and his boss, Operations Director Mark McGrath, told the committee. They include funding, storm drains, utility companies, developers, work efficiencies, Mother Nature and a state regulatory agency.
Two at a time
Take the situation with a pair of perpendicular streets downtown, they said.
Crews are working on Lindale Street, ranked No. 27, which runs into Highland Road, No. 56. Because all the equipment and materials are in place, crews are doing both.
“I try to capture as many bad roads as I can in the area where we are,” Turk said.
“We do as many streets in a neighborhood as possible to be as efficient as we can wherever we drop anchor,” McGrath said.
That’s smart, representatives agreed. But it means Highland Road gets bumped above a street that was ranked worse.
“The problem is we are telling constituents we have a system, but the system has been shortcircuited,” Watkins said. “We’re sucking all the money out of the strategic plan.”
It’s not the only thing that takes capital funding out of paving.
Funding gaps
“Last year you approved $6 million but I only got $4.4 million because the mold problem in the schools sucked it up,” Turk told the representatives. “Another year the new police station sucked up all the money.”
And it’s not just how much funding, but when it arrives.
McGrath said Turk usually has spent all the money in his budget before the fiscal year ends on June 30. But he does not receive the new funding as soon as the next fiscal year starts July 1 because it must be bonded.
“I don’t get it in the account until the end of August,” Turk said.
“We waste the middle of summer, the optimum time to pave,” McGrath said.
Representatives wanted to know how many streets they can fix in a year.
“I don’t know,” Turk said. “Each road is a different animal. A flat road needs storm drains every ten feet. A hilly road needs less.”
Shippan Avenue, for example, is wide and flat with lots of storm drains. Redoing it would cost $1 million, Turk said. But Taconic Road in North Stamford is narrow and hilly with no drains. It would cost a third of that.
Too many digs
Weather is always at play, Turk said. Crews don’t do road maintenance in November and December because they are picking up leaves. After that it’s too cold to pave so they just do pothole repairs.
“Two years ago we had
three windstorms in a row and that killed our flow because we had to clean up,” he said.
But the biggest obstacle is the gas, electric, water and cable utility companies and the developers that constantly dig into the streets, he and McGrath said.
Turk, for example, planned to fix Greyrock Place, No. 14 on the list, but then a developer began to build on the longvacant parcel known as The Hole in the Ground.
“So I had to hold off,” Turk said.
Rep. John Zelinsky Jr., D11, asked about Bedford Street in his district. It’s cracking and was ranked high on the paving list — No. 19.
“We can’t pave it until they demolish the old police station,” Turk said.
McGrath explained the problem with street repairs by utility companies. If they dig up one side of a street to replace a pipe, they in most cases repave only that side, leaving the street uneven — and the city to fix it.
“That chews into the budget and slows progress on the ranked streets,” Turk said.
Failure to communicate
Representatives last year passed measures to protect newly resurfaced roads and set stricter standards for repaving by utilities and developers, but there may still be problems.
Rep. Monica Di Costanzo, D7, said the city “nicely paved” a street in her Glenbrook district and within a couple of months, “there were orange marks all over it,” indicating a utility company intends to dig it up.
It may be some type of emergency, McGrath said, but he can’t say for sure.
“Communication with the utilities is fair, at best,” he said.
He’s been asking for the utilities’ work schedules since he became operations director nearly a year ago, McGrath said.
“We want their weekly reports so we can see where they’ll be,” he said. “But it’s challenging to get information out of them.”
The same with the Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, which checks pressure in aging gas mains and looks for leaks.
“They’re doing surprise inspections,” McGrath said. “Two weeks after we pave, they’re putting a hole in our new street. That’s happened several times.”
‘Not getting there’
Each time road crews have to backtrack, the paving list is affected.
“I tell my constituents, ‘You are on the list; we’re getting there,’ ” Watkins said. “But we’re not getting there at all.”
Rep. J.R. McMullen, R18, said the list also is affected by the mayor’s decision two years ago to consider not just road condition but traffic volume when deciding which streets to pave. Martin said the majority of complaints were about side streets, where most people live, and not the main arteries. So little roads were getting fixed and places like Summer, Broad and Atlantic streets kept deteriorating.
“Now if you live on a crappy street with low traffic volume, it’s never going to get paved,” McMullen said.
Turk told the committee he needs about $6 million a year for 10 years to fix all the roads that need fixing. Since he became supervisor three years ago, 36 road miles have been paved — about 10 percent of all the streets in the city, Turk said.
Many of the completed projects involved large roads that required intensive work, he said. Once those are done, the smaller residential streets will go more quickly.
“I wish I could give you more specifics,” Turk told the committee.