Dennis LaForest
Unlike most City Manager newsletters, this is confined to one important topic.
Streets
In last year’s City of St. Johns Citizens’ Survey, 68% of respondents identified the need for street repairs and improvements as a top priority. This came as no surprise to city staff or the members of the City Commission. Anyone who travels our main thoroughfares and neighborhood streets can only come away with the sense that our streets are generally in poor condition and in need of significant upgrades. Like any infrastructure, streets have limited life absent a program designed to provide periodic maintenance and repair. Street improvements don’t come cheap. Any program of this nature is heavily dependent on adequate funds.
Over the last 10 years the City Commission and city staff have made a commitment to improve as many street sections as feasible given the limited revenues available. This approach, in conjunction with the receipt of some state and federal grant funds, allowed the City to move forward with several significant upgrades of certain sections of city streets. At most this approach has only kept our heads above water. Bluntly put, unless we find a new and better way to fund a program that provides continuing revenues for street maintenance and repair, it is only a matter of time before the street system will fall into complete disrepair.
In response to the citizens’ survey, and recognizing the critical stage we find ourselves at with respect to the condition of our city streets, the St. Johns City Commission took up the matter at its public meeting on March 25, 2013. After considerable discussion the consensus among the commissioners was that a street millage would be the only realistic approach to adequately funding a street maintenance and repair program. Commissioners agreed that a dedicated street millage over a several year period was the fairest method of developing a revenue stream. In terms of specifics, commissioners discussed the propriety of a 4 mill levy over four years. This dedicated millage would generate approximately $800,000/year for street improvements. This is in contrast to previous street millage proposals that, if passed, would have generated somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 million dollars in road funds over the life of the millage levy. This more modest approach now under consideration would create a 3.2 million dollar fund for street repairs. While not sufficient to implement a comprehensive street maintenance program, this revenue source would allow the City to more ambitiously address top priority street repairs.
In summary, we are at a crossroads (no pun intended) with respect to our city streets. We either find sufficient monies to fix our streets, or we watch them turn into obstacle courses of cracks, crevasses and potholes. We know we can’t depend on the feds or the state to bail us out. We’ve looked for federal and state grants. We’ve asked for help. Help is not on the way. It has come down to this: we own our streets and we must find a way at the local level to maintain them, fix them; improve them. It simply won’t happen if we don’t have the money.