Edna plans long-term street improvements
By John Meng General Manager/Editor Regardless of whether it’s District 1 or District 4, city roads are a perpetual concern for Edna residents. At last week’s City Council meeting, City Manager and the City Council laid out a plan to repair roads over the coming years.
Ben Galvan, president of CivilCorp of Victoria, attended the meeting and presented a detailed street assessment which rated every street in the city as Poor, Fair or Good.
“The city has approximately 47 miles of streets,” said Galvan, whose company has offices in Victoria, Houston, Round Rock and Corpus Christi.
CivilCorp specializes in transportation, infrastructure, and site development engineering, as well as a full range of land surveying services including boundary, topographic, right of way, and control.
Of those 47 miles, Galvan explained that their assessment indicated that 18 percent of the road (9 miles) were considered in poor condition, 34 percent of the roads were rated fair, and about 48 percent of the roads were in good condition.
While the poor roads could require significant works, other roads may only require a new sealcoat which has an approximate lifespan of seven years.
Galvan also noted that the key to much of the repairs will depend on the condition of the water and sewer lines running beneath the roadways, and the city needs to assess those lines as well.
“This is a start of the process,” said Edna City Manager Gary Broz, who anticipated that the first round of budgeting for street repairs would be $4 million.
“Our whole city has now been assessed as good, either good, fair or poor,” said Broz.
“It’s time to build a program for the streets and now we have to plug in water and wastewater to see what condition they are in.
“We’re just trying to build a program so we can start fixing everything,” said Broz.
The city manager, who just celebrated his one-year anniversary with Edna, explained that the $4 million budgeted is the first part of the project. If the city committed to $4 million every other year or every third year, the entire project could take 10 to 12 years.
However, during that 10 to12 year time frame, the condition of the roads will not remain constant.
“We’re looking at spending 50 percent on the bad, 25 percent on the fair and 25 percent on the good. That way, we’re taking care of all of them. We don’t want our good roads dropping down into the fair category and we don’t want the fair roads dropping down into the bad category. We’re trying to maintain what we have and begin making improvements,” said Broz.
“An assessment is a work in progress. But we had to start somewhere and we need to systematically put it together instead of just randomly choosing streets for repair.”