It’s a common gripe among readers’ emails to the Road Warrior: My road is full of potholes; when is the county going to pave it?
For example:
–Point Cabrillo Drive, one continuous pothole, has not been paved in 40 years, yet carries traffic to a central tourist attraction — the Point Cabrillo Lighthouse. It runs from Russian Gulch State Park down to Caspar Beach and then up to Highway 1. The road looks worse than many in a Third World country. When is Point Cabrillo going to be paved?
–Cavanaugh Lane, off Skillman in Petaluma, is constantly full of huge potholes, deep. Heavy trucks that use it are tearing it up. When is it going to be paved?
The answer for paving Point Cabrillo Drive is probably within a couple of years. For paving Cavanaugh, probably never. For your road, it depends.
With local counties facing budget crises, road department officials say that unless your road is considered a key road, maintenance of it is going to be just the basics, and even that depends on future funding for it.
In Sonoma County, the county Board of Supervisors a year ago decided to keep 155.9 miles of the 1,382.8 miles of county-maintained roads in good shape. Then last month the board endorsed a plan to add 62.8 miles to that “pavement preservation” list.
Other than those 218.7 miles of roads and in certain other cases that may come up, Sonoma County officials have acknowledged that they’ll do what they can to fill potholes and such but residents shouldn’t expect the county to come out to put down a fresh layer of asphalt.
In Mendocino County, officials also are struggling to keep their about 1,020 miles of roads maintained.
For most people, “the road that they drive to work is the most important one in the county,” said Kent Standley, deputy director of maintenance services for the county Department of Transportation.
But he said he must consider a few factors when deciding how much repair work a road will get: Its volume of traffic, its current condition — is it repairable or does it need complete reconstruction — and is there money to do the work.
He said many of the county’s roads started out as wagon roads that eventually got paved but without adequate sub-bases for heavy traffic or heavy loads. As a result, they’re falling apart and there’s not enough money to rebuild them.
For Point Cabrillo Drive, Standley said while his goal is to repave it within a couple of years, that work also depends upon funding.
For Cavanaugh Lane, about half of which is dirt, Tom O’Kane, deputy director of the Sonoma County Transportation and Public Works Department, said last week that it “is not included in the 158-mile priority road network and, therefore, it is not scheduled for any rehabilitation or paving at this time. It is a dead end road that is in poor condition. The egg plant operator at the end of the road has agreed to grade it when he does his parking areas. I was on Cavanaugh two weeks ago, and it had recently been graded. We will check it again for potholes.”
Both counties are still striving to fill potholes. So if you know of one, call 463-4363 in Mendocino County and 565-2237 in Sonoma County.
To read about what readers consider the worst roads in Sonoma County,
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