City officials seeking fix as neighborhood streets deteriorate below standard

KRIS 6 News
By: Taylor Alanis
Posted at 8:18 PM, Sep 21, 2022
last updated 7:26 PM, Sep 21, 2022

CORPUS CHRISTI  — “We need a street that lasts 30 years, not a street that lasts three years,” Greg Smith, the District 4 Corpus Christi city councilman, said.

City of Corpus Christi engineers said 56 percent of streets built in neighborhoods between 2011 and 2014 are currently below standard.

“Half the streets that we receive from developers don’t perform the way they’re supposed to,” Smith said. “They’re poor streets.”

“A lot of our streets are well made, but boy are you seeing a lot of red,” Smith said as he pointed to a map full of red and blue highlighted streets.

Blue were above standard and red were below.

Smith said even though some of the degradation is obvious, a lot is below the surface.

“When they put the pipes in, they didn’t pack the dirt in good enough so there’s valley’s in the streets,” Smith said. “You have pavement that’s cracking in there. Maybe it wasn’t thick enough.”

When a neighborhood is built, the developer also builds the residential streets while the city inspects them.

“My department has that responsibility to do those inspections to make sure the construction meets the approved plans,” Jeff Edmonds, the director of engineering services for the City of Corpus Christi, said.

But, Smith said for the past decade or so, the city has not been charging the developers a full or updated inspection fee.

“There was a fee last year and council agreed to a four-year phase in,” Edmonds said.

Smith said when the city doesn’t charge a full fee, tax payers foot the bill.

“You and I are paying for it in our property taxes and our utility bills,” Edmonds said.

To help alleviate that cost, some council members said they need to take action now by hiring more inspectors and doubling the time they have to inspect.

“We have a responsibility for the inspection of all the city’s project as well as private development,” Edmond said.

Edmond said only 20 percent of their workload are inspections for developers.

”We all know the conditions of our streets,” Smith said. “We need to be working for those existing streets now — not having to go in a few years after we get a dedicated street from a developer, and having to be fixing those when we need to be taking care of those long-term streets.”

But councilmember at-large Mike Pusley said those neighborhood streets take a beating before people move into the houses on them.

“You start running concrete trucks, delivery trucks and lumber trucks that go across the street during that residential process,” Pusley said.

Pusley added the city needs to take a step back to see how they can make them stronger or have stricter inspection standards.

We’re getting streets that are obviously failing,” Pusley said. “Let’s do more inspection to make sure they’re built as they should be built.”

Pusley said he wants to make sure inspection standards are better.

“We need to make certain that we’re doing the proper inspections that the city has the proper inspections,” Pusley said. “And that a lot of times, what the staff showed us is that the inspectors are just so busy cause we have so much growth going on in Corpus Christi.”

Pusley said inspectors aren’t able to keep up with that growth.

He said they're already in year one of a four year plan already in place to fully charge that inspection fee and council will be discussing those inspection standards and the action the city needs to take moving forward at their next budget workshop.

“After year four we should be recovering our cost,” Edmonds said. “So that cost is being shifted from the taxpayer to the developer.”