College Station City Council discusses street maintenance plan

College Station City Council members discussed plans for street maintenance after a presentation last week from the city’s Public Works Department.

Emily Fisher, the city’s director of public works, presented the plan and said the department’s Street Maintenance Division has 19 employees and maintains about 356 centerline miles of roadway. Centerline miles measure the length of a road or highway regardless of how many lanes it has, according to the Texas Department of Transportation.

The Street Maintenance Division evaluates streets by utilizing a Pavement Condition Index, which assigns a score to every street, Fisher said. A Paver Distress Identification Manual, developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is used to define different distresses or issues found in asphalt and pavement, and it examines the various severity levels, she said.

Ten types of distresses in the roads, like cracking or potholes, are examined, and each issue is ranked on a scale of zero to five, Fisher said. For example, a street that has several potholes throughout would be ranked a five, and if it doesn’t have any, it would be ranked a zero. Every street receives a ranking and the information is stored in the city’s asset management program, she said.

These distresses are then calculated in an algorithm that creates the Pavement Condition Index [PCI], which is a score given to the street from zero to 100; zero being the lowest and 100 being the best, Fisher said.

“The city is divided into subareas and each subarea is given an average PCI. … How do we determine when something needs to be done and what needs to be done? Well, through the PCI cost curve,” Fisher told the council. “The pavement condition is looked at going from zero up to 100, and shows over time how the condition of a street deteriorates. With street traffic and weather-impacted streets, the quality and condition of the street is going to go down.”

Fisher said when the Street Maintenance Division is looking at repairing potholes and patching streets, it wants to catch those distresses before they become worse. If that maintenance is done early, the condition of the pavement goes up, she said.

“You are extending the life of your pavement by getting to that maintenance ahead of time,” she said. “When you are not able to do that and you wait, the street begins to deteriorate and it becomes more expensive to maintain. As time goes on, the street is going to come to a point where it is not able to be maintained by the Public Works Department, and that is when a project becomes a capital project and becomes a full reconstruction.”

Streetway maintenance funds mostly derive from the city’s roadway maintenance fund and a small portion from the general fund, Fisher said. She also presented a draft plan for the next several years in street maintenance, and said she hopes to hold a public meeting in February or March to present upcoming street projects to the public.

Council member Elizabeth Cunha asked Fisher what the procedure would be if someone had a pothole that needed to be fixed and wanted to communicate that to the city. Fisher said residents can use SeeClickFix, which is an online and smartphone application that allows citizens to report code enforcement violations and other nonemergency issues, as stated on the city’s website.

“People can also call the Public Works Department,” Fisher said. “There is a number and email on our website that they can reach out, or they can call me and we will take care of it.”

College Station City Manager Bryan Woods said public input meetings are another resource for residents to express their maintenance concerns.

After Fisher concluded her presentation, council member Dennis Maloney said he appreciated the Public Works Department for staying on top of the upkeep with the city’s streets.

“I appreciate the coordination because it saves us money in the long run. Keep up the good work,” he said.

To contact the Public Works Department, call 979-764-3690 or email pubworks@cstx.gov.

To report an issue through SeeClickFix, visit https://www.cstx.gov/departments___city_hall/commserv/code/see_click_fix.