Ward 12 News: Roads We Are Repaving in 2024

View this email in your browser

Dear Neighbors,

This email is always our most popular email of the year and also the one I get the most responses to.

This is the email where I tell you which roads are getting repaved in Ward 12 this year. And where, statistically speaking, I'm likely telling you it's not the road you live on.

I can say that with confidence because each Ward gets a budget of only $700,000 to repave roads -- which can cover the cost of only a fraction of the roads in our Ward that need repaired. Only a lucky few will get their roads repaved this season.

This year I tried to create a visual to show how far our money goes. Every orange and red street in this map needs to be repaved in Ward 12. The blue line is the length of road we can repave at the scale of this map.

Because I cannot get every road repaved, my goal is to share what we do know and the action steps we are taking. This newsletter will try to answer these questions:

How bad are our roads?
How much do we spend to repave our roads?
What Ward 12 roads will be repaved this year?

Finally, make sure read all the way to the bottom of this email for information on National Air Quality Awareness week and some important reminders of upcoming events in Ward 12.

All the best,

Councilwoman Rebecca Maurer

Road Repaving

How bad are our roads?

The short answer: pretty bad.

The long answer: Cleveland uses a Pavement Condition Rating (PCR) to analyze our roads. Every street in the city was given a PCR in 2015. The PCRs allow us to rate roads from A to F. PCRs are adjusted over time either by in-person review or by a mathematical "degredation" formula.

But as you can see from 2015 to 2024 we have more F-rated streets than we used to have.

2015 Roads Assessment
Dark Blue (A), Light Blue (B), Green (C) Orange (D), Red (F)

2023 Roads Assessment
F-rated streets are in red. D-rated streets are in orange. (I realize this may be hard to read in an email format. If you have a question about your streets ratings, we can find that out for you.)

These ward-wide maps are a useful snapshot, but even I can see errors in these maps -- roads that I know are in terrible condition that are not marked in red. The city knows it needs a fresh assessment of the roads, especially now that technology can make those assessments more objective and consistent.

Action Items: In 2023, Council passed Ordinance 591-2023 to approve a new pavement assessment using better technology. This will give us new insight into our city-wide goal of getting to an average PCR between a C and a B. This project has taken a while to get underway, but we hope to complete it in 2024.

How much do we spend to repave roads?

Short answer: Not enough.

This year, like in recent years, the city has set aside $12 million each year for our residential repaving program. It is split evenly among the wards for a little more than $700,000 per ward.

According to our own pavement management study, this simply is not enough money to keep up with deteriorating roads. In 2016, $10 million was the absolute bare minimum to invest -- and even that resulted in only half of streets being repaved in 20 years. All the rest of those good roads will be F-rated by then!

In 2023, the City had the chance to invest more money. The Administration spent an additional $15 million in road repaving out of ARPA dollars, which allowed us to do repave streets like Morningside in Old Brooklyn and Claasen Avenue in Slavic Village. (For those of you following along from the last year, the brick street on W 22nd in Brooklyn Centre still needs to be completed.)

What Ward 12 roads will be repaved this year?

Cleveland is using a worst-first model for road repair, meaning that we only repave streets that are in bad condition. Still, there's not enough money to go around. This year we are tackling smaller side streets with low Pavement Condition Ratings. Here is the list that will be repaved:

Action Item: You should see work begin in the next few weeks on these projects. In fact, many of them started this week.

Thank you in advance for your patience with the construction. Please remember -- if there are raised castings in the road, the work is not yet done. The crews will be back for a final layer of asphalt!

Air Quality Awareness

This is National Air Quality Awareness Week. This is a critical issue in Ward 12 where we have some of the highest asthma rates in the region because of our proximity to highways and industrial sites.

Coming up in Ward 12

Do you find these emails helpful? Tell a neighbor to sign up! Anybody can join using this link.

Copyright © 2024 Councilwoman Maurer, All rights reserved.

Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.