City Council - workshop

All right, good afternoon. It is Thursday, July 16th, and we have a study session today on pavement preservation, and it's going to be led by our wonderful public works team, Miranda Lang and Grant Williams. So I'll just turn it over to you guys, and we'll go from there.

Awesome. Thank you. So, yes, with us today is Grant Williams. He is our pavement management expert, and he knows all things in and out, everything here within the city as far as pavement management goes, and he is really our go-to person on this. And he also manages our whole system as far as when slurry seals happen, chip seals, crack seals, when we do a full rehab. So he's here to talk about kind of the updates of where we have been with the TBD funds. and where we're headed in the future.

All right, well, that was quite the introduction. I'll get used to speaking into this microphone thing. So yeah, like Miranda mentioned, most of you guys know me, I'm Grant Williams. I spent quite a bit of time at Clackamas County down in Oregon as their senior paper manager for 12 years before I came here to the city of Ridgefield. We're going to kind of go through pavement management today. I know that back when I presented this, when we implemented the TBD, there was some different council members here. So I'm going to kind of quickly go through kind of a high level, what is pavement management to you guys? What do we use it for? How do we select which roads we're going to do which treatment to? I usually like when I've given this presentation in the past, I'll have a map of the city with all of our city streets. And when I've done it to the public before, I say, do you want to know how we decide which streets we're going to do? And I throw a dart at the map and where it sticks. I said, we're going to do that road. And they're like, I knew it. I knew it. And then you kind of go into this information of what is pavement management. And actually, what is the data behind it? How do we decide which roads we're going to do? Our principle is we want to keep good roads good. Do the right road with the right treatment at the right time. We can go to the next slide. So this kind of briefly touched through what is a pavement management system. It's a software program that we use to develop effective strategies for maintaining our roadways. Our system that we use for the city of Ridgefield is Street Saver. Street Saver is probably one of the most widely used pavement management software systems in the United States. A lot of agencies use it. It's really intuitive in what it does, but at the end of the day, it's a system. Still takes human input. Shows us the effects of the maintenance decisions that we make so we can project out, like, if we make this decision, what impacts that can have on our system long term. Shows the current condition of our roadway network, as well as predicts deterioration over time. So we'll go into it here in a minute. PCI. PCI stands for Pavement Condition Index. It's a scale of 0 to 100. 0 is a road that's basically a dirt road. There's nothing left. 100 is a brand new paved road. So that's how the roads are rated. We actually have a consultant that goes out and we're on year one of a five-year contract right now with a consultant that goes out and does road ratings on our roads. So they actually go out, they get out of the car, they take a section of road and they take a 2,500 square foot area that's a representative sample of the condition of that road and they measure all the distresses in there. And if it's low severity... medium severity, high severity, et cetera. That all goes into calculating that PCI, generating a number for the road, what sort of condition it's in. It allows us to forecast current and future budget needs, something you all are familiar with as we go through budget. What are we gonna need? What's it gonna take to maintain our roads? What condition is acceptable for us to have our roads in for our community? And also allows us to get better effects or better analysis of the effects of development traffic on our roadway. When I started here at the city of Ridgefield, I actually came to a council meeting before I started working here. And I spoke to Brian Cass' presentation on payment. That's when you guys were going to do the vehicle registration fees. And I kind of talked about, hey, a lot of the money that's being funded here is to go on local roads is what's predicted. for the money to be used for, but the arterials and collectors were getting just hammered by development, and those are the costlier ones to repair. So can we go to the next slide? So again, I mentioned PCI stands for pavement condition index. It's a scale from zero to 100. 100 is a brand new road. Zero is a destroyed road. It's generated by measuring surface distresses on the roadway. There's actually 12 distresses that are measured. There's alligator cracking. There's transverse cracking, longitudinal, rutting, shoving, weathering. They're just different distresses that happen to the asphalt. Some of those distresses are load related, meaning heavy loads going over them cause the deteriorations like rutting, obviously. Other ones are more environmental, weathering, sun, UV damage, et cetera, rain, snow, ice. Roads, obviously, with more traffic deteriorated at a faster rate than those with less traffic and the heavy loads impact. So you can see over on the right-hand side, this is basically condition categories. So when I show you here in a minute the PCI condition of our road network, These are the PCI breakpoints. So this is what the system uses. So when I met with council when I started here and the TBD discussion was happening, it was identified at that time that we wanted to maintain the current PCI that we had. At the time it was 79. That's our average network PCI, so that was a condition our entire road network as an average was at. So you can see where that would land us here. That would actually land us in the very good category. And I will say I get an email monthly from Street Saver that compares us and our network in Ridgefield to other municipalities across the United States of similar size, similar size road network to us, and we're routinely in the top 95%. So we're doing really, really good compared to our peers. Again, you'll see in the condition category two and three, good, you'll see non-load and load. So it breaks good category into two different conditions. Are the distresses that are measured in it load related or not load related? Because that changes our maintenance strategy of what we're going to do to it. So this just kind of gives you an idea of the PCI on the left and what condition category would put it in based on what the road is rated. Go ahead, next slide. So pavement deterioration curve. This is where I wish I had a laser pointer. So in the pavement management world, this is our go-to image. So what this shows you is the PCI, the condition on the left over time, which is on the bottom axis of the graph. So when we pave a brand new road, it starts up there in excellent condition and it starts going out over time. And then you see around the 15 year, it really starts to drop off the condition of the road. What we try to do where you see the little shark's teeth up at the top, that's keeping a good road good. So that is a slurry seal, a chip seal, a crack seal, et cetera. And you guys are familiar that we do a lot of slurry seals in our neighborhoods, for instance. That's what that's doing. That's taking that pavement deterioration curve and we're basically jumping it back up to a good condition and starting the curve over to extend time. Every one of those little shark's teeth that we do are usually seven to 10 year lifespan. So a slurry seal gains us about seven to 10 years life on the road. And we can do a maximum of three of those. before we have to mill it out and put asphalt in because you'll get an oversaturation of oil.

Flourish will get an extra 10 years, an additional 10 years?

Seven to 10 years on average, yes. Yep. And so if you look at the jump up on those deterioration curve where it says spending a dollar preservation here, where you look at the vertical that goes straight up, That's what we look at the cost to benefit ratio. So if I take a road that's up there that I can spend on average $2 a square yard for slurry seal, and I can start that deterioration curve over, I can extend that life out, that's a lot better than if I wait till it gets down into the poor condition. That vertical to get it back up to excellent, that's that cost to benefit, much higher cost, $18 to $20 a square yard to pave it that starts the deterioration curve back over again. Kind of the principles behind pavement management and the strategy is, like I said at the beginning, keeping good roads good, doing the right road with the right treatment at the right time. Where it really helps to tell the public this is we'll get a lot of pushback. Why are you doing this road? This road's in really poor condition. Why are you doing this road? Because if I have a set budget per year and I do all of these lower cost preservation treatments, I can affect way more of my network than I can if I put all my eggs in one basket to bring one road back up into good shape. But the public will see this road's in really poor condition, do this one. And it's not saying that we're not going to do those, but our strategy is to put 70, sometimes 80% of our funds into the preservation treatments while setting aside 20% that then we can try to go look for grant funding to do what we call rehab projects. So Union Ridge Parkway, you've probably heard of. It needs to be rehabbed. We're going to seek grant funding, but we're also setting aside some of our TBD funds to A, design it, and B, to be matched money to go do that project. So I just want to make it clear, because a lot of times people are like, well, you're not going to touch my road because it's in poor condition. No, we are. But our strategy is we don't want to let the rest of our network fail while we focus on a few really bad roads. We're still going to do them, but we're going to try to keep good roads good at the same time. So next slide, please. So, like I said, our PCI right now is a 77, so you guys could be like, well, I thought you said it was set at a 79. You're failing. It appears that way, but that's not quite the case. So, A, our roads are continuing to deteriorate, but one of the main reasons why it dropped from a 79 to a 77 is we took on Pioneer Street. We took over ownership of it. That's a pretty big road with a lot of asphalt that was in questionable condition here and there, so... that has an impact. Our number, we have to be cautious. While I said we're doing better than most of our peer agencies, we're also growing much faster than a lot of our peer agencies. So we have a lot of brand new roads that are being built in neighborhoods, which inflates our PCI average over our entire network. So industry standard optimal PCI is low to mid 80s. So even at a 77, Average agencies of our size are an average PCI of between 63 and 65. So we're actually doing really, really well.

Can I ask a question?

Yeah. So when a new development comes in, sorry.

When a new development is built, like right now up on Hillhurst, there's that Tapani's doing, I mean, Rachi's doing that work. So do they have to, because they're doing that, they were doing the road, right, not us. So do they have to do it to your standard? Yeah. Okay, all right, thank you.

Yeah, yeah, so they, anytime, developments, they have to meet our engineering standards. I had a lot of input on our engineering standards. Miranda can attest, sometimes I can kind of geek out on asphalt and road building. That's been my background for a long time, so. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I had a lot of input on that. Actually worked, started when Brenda was here and through Chuck Green, To increase our asphalt sections actually our asphalt standard for local streets was three inches over ten at three inches of asphalt over ten inches of rock I Argued to increase that to four inches and we also on arterials and collectors We increase the thickness of those the main reason I wanted to do it on local neighborhood streets is Once I've reached those three slurry seals and I can't put down a fourth because it'll it'll flush and the oil will bleed through I have to do asphalt and Well, if we're using half inch asphalt, it's one and a half times the nominal thickness of rock. So I've got to do a two inch lift minimum with half inch asphalt. I can't grind out two inches of asphalt and expect that bottom inch to stay. It's going to come up too. But with four inches of asphalt, I can grind two, leave two, and do an inlay. So that was one of the reasons why it's a, and it's, you know, it's a little bit cheaper assurance for us that that road's going to last. A little bit longer.

So while we're on that, just really curious, because most of my questions are going to be kind of more financially related, but is there a, so if you add an extra inch, like four, you know, go to four inches instead of three inches, that obviously costs more, but does that yield a longer lifespan of that road? Yes. Okay. Yes, much longer. Okay. So it's more cost effective overall to go four instead of three? Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, and there's a lot of agencies out there, I happen to be a fan of it, there's a thing called Perpetual Pavement, Perpetual pavement, the principle of it is do a thick, very thick asphalt section because what you want to facilitate is you want top-down failure versus bottom-up. So a thicker asphalt section, if you think of a 2x4 and you put weight on it, the strain on that 2x4 with the weight is on that bottom cord. It's trying to pull apart. The thicker you get with asphalt, the lower that strain is on that bottom cord. And if you get cracks that start from the top and go down, I can perpetually grind those cracks out and inlay and it lasts forever. Sorry, I digress.

One more question here.

So it's also interesting because the freeway, I-5 where they just replaced that, they went four inches on that, didn't they? Because they said they were adding an inch at a time.

They went about eight to ten inches.

They did go eight to ten.

I mean, it feels like so fabulous.

We're such a short time.

And one of one of the reasons why they did that was they didn't want to remove the concrete because that's concrete that's under there and a bunch of the panels were starting to tilt and that's why it was so rough. They actually went through with a big machine that drops a weight and it fractured the concrete. to try to get it to act as base rock. And they went thicker with their asphalt section. Because one of the things with asphalt, why you can't just go out and put new asphalt over a really, really bad road is those cracks will reflect up through the new asphalt in no time. But if you can thicken that section, it slows that process down quite a bit.

So can we go to the next slide, please?

So this is a quick summary of our network. So our roads, I'm assuming you guys are familiar. There's arterials, collectors, and residentials or locals. Arterials being like Pioneer, your collectors being like, I would argue that Hillhurst is probably an arterial, but some of your larger roads that take you to an arterial and then your local, your neighborhood streets take you to a collector, collector to an arterial, et cetera. So what we have right now is our arterials, we have 13.49 centerline miles of arterials in the city. We currently have nine and a half miles of collectors, and we have 41.93 miles of locals. So earlier when I said our PCI is largely driven by all of our new developments and the new roads, you can see how many more locals we have mileage-wise than we do arterials and collectors. You can also see over on the right-hand side the PCI for each of those areas. functional class of roads. So arterials, just like I would expect to see, they're in our worst condition. They get the most amount of traffic. Collectors are just behind them and then our locals obviously are in the best condition. This down here shows you basically the graph on the left is our arterials. I know it's kind of hard to see from here. But it shows you that most of our arterials are in the green category, which if you recall from the PCI breakpoints, that's our very good category. Blue and yellow are good. And then your orange and your red start to get into your poor and your very poor condition. So the graph in the middle is the same thing with our collectors. The thing that I would really pick up on this that's good is in all of our functional classifications, our largest... bar is our very good condition, which means we're doing a good job. So we can go to the next slide. So this is a view of the condition category, those same colors of our road network. So these are all of our streets. You may look on here and say, well, there's a few that aren't on there. We're constantly, as we're accepting new roads, even though they're built until they're owned and maintained by the city, they don't necessarily make it onto our map. This kind of gives you a good snapshot and a good idea. You can see Union Ridge Parkway over to the right, the red and the orange. And that road also, as a collector, gets a tremendous amount of truck traffic. So you expect to see very accelerated deterioration over there, which we're seeing. I actually did a site walk with our consultants that's doing design on that right now the other day. you get out and you walk it it's even more pronounced so but this gives you a good idea of kind of where we're at in the city you can see royal road between hillhurst and 19th and yellow that's we're actually working on design on all of those sections right now and then you can see one of the challenges is our downtown area not overall in the worst condition but You know, there's some challenges down there, and one of the challenges that we have downtown is drainage. We can't just go in and rebuild and fix a road without adding the drainage to it. So we can go to the next slide. So treatment history from 2021 to 2025. What have we been doing? This kind of gives you a snapshot of what we've done. These are in different colors because they're They represent, and I don't know why my little legend didn't show up on here. Essentially your greens, your light greens and your dark greens are slurry seal that we've done. Some of the reds like on Hillhurst, some of the light blues on Hillhurst were paving. There was some asphalt rubber chip seal that we did on Heron Drive. You can see over to the East Fifth Street, we rebuilt that through there. That was kind of the same thing that we're going to do to Union Ridge Parkway where there's going to be areas of full depth repair and grinding inlay. So this just kind of gives you a snapshot of since 2021 through 2025 what we've done with TBD funds that we've received. And as you can see, we've really tried to move around the city and affect a lot of different areas. It may look like on the east side we haven't done much. Fifth Street was a pretty expensive project. The neighborhood just down below Dollar Tree is actually slated to go this year with slurry seals, so that's getting done. The south end of town, Kennedy, is actually one this year that's also going to get slurry sealed. So we've really tried to make sure that the residents in the city using Street Saver. So Street Saver, I'll show you on the next slide here. Again, Street Saver is a tool and it breaks all of our roads into sections. And so it could say, if you take Kennedy subdivision, for instance, It could say in 2026, there's two streets in there doing 2026. In 2027, do these other three in there. And in 2028, do the other ones. Well, us, to save money, we combine those together and get them all done at once while we're in there. It's less disruption to the residents that live there. It's more cost effective for us with a contractor with mobilization costs, et cetera, to just do it then. That's the human component. The system is still just a system, but it guides us on where to target. And then we're always very cognizant of making sure that we're spreading the treatments around the city so that all of the residents in Ridgefield feel like, hey, we can see you're out here and this is actually working and you're affecting streets all around the city. So can we go to the next slide? So projected five-year treatment plan. So I didn't break this out year by year for many reasons. And Miranda's asked me before, like, can you give us a plan that shows, you know, this year and the next year and the three years later and four years later? You can, but it's very difficult to do because there's a lot of variables and a lot of factors. Some of these projects, like you'll see Pioneer Street on here, all that pink area coming through there. Pioneer Street's on my radar because it needs a lot of work. that's going to take some additional match funds for us to be able to do something like that. Because in order to pave that, that could be $6.5 million. Well, at $600,000 a year, that could take me 10 years to save up to do one road. Meanwhile, I'm not touching anything else. So we have to get very strategic on how we leverage funds that we have to knock out some of these rehab-type projects while still being able to do preservation. So this just kind of gives you an idea. When I run this scenario, and this scenario that I ran in Street Saver was a million dollars per year because that's about what it's going to take now to maintain our network at that 79 PCI. So it's going to get us back to that two PCI points, and that's for the streets only roughly what it's going to take. The other component with that that I'll share with you guys is we just recently completed our ADA transition plan. We got a lot of data from that on our arterials and collectors on ADA ramps. You all approved for us to add the curb ramp module into Street Saver, our pavement management system. The thing that's going to be nice about that is we can take all of that data that was generated with the ADA transition plan and the data that they collected input that into Street Saver. So Street Saver now, when it runs and says, hey, Pioneer Street from Maine to Hillhurst needs to be repaved, it's also gonna know that you've got six curb ramps that are not ADA compliant that need to be fixed, and here's the cost associated with those. And it's gonna factor that in to the scenarios when it runs it. So this is at a million dollars per year over the next five years. This is what Street Saver's like. Here's where you should do treatments to roots. This is what's projected. And then we'll go through and refine this.

For Pioneer, for example, if any work, you know, we're talking about extensions, potentially different extension areas for Pioneer. Would we be able to wrap something like this into that project or does that have to be completely separate because there will be road disruption? So could we lump in a slurry seal with the road repair as we're cleaning things up?

I guess I would ask for a clarification when you say extensions.

Sorry, when we're, we're looking at a 35th extension or Burt singer, right? So there's going to be disruption on pioneer with construction. So could we lump one of these projects into that one or do they have to be completely separate budgets?

Well, the difficult piece is, so we can't leverage public funds and I don't know Kirk's in here. We can't partner public and private dollars to my extent. We have before in the past with like Clark Regional. Clark Regional was paying a private developer to extend a sewer line for them. And because Clark Regional was paying for that, we were able to partner 65th over by the fire station. We actually were able to do that where we paid for a lane. Clark Regional paid for the other lane to get the road reconstructed.

So to add into that, if it was a private developer that's doing the work, if we join in on that, put $1 into it, that requires prevailing wages. So that increases significantly their cost and our cost. So most cases, we're not going to do something like that. If it's something... And what we're talking about with pavement preservation typically wouldn't qualify when we do road projects where we ask the developer to do it. Typically, we're doing that on the TIFF credit plan, but that has to be on our our project list. And that's a little bit different. But you're not talking slurry seals and things like that.

One thing I do want to add to that, though, real quick is we do try to look for economies of scale. which I think is what you're getting at, how are we impacting traffic, get in, get out, stay out, and also find the biggest bang for the buck. So that is one thing we are constantly working on doing.

I have a question. So speaking of trafficked and impact, one of the things that we're hearing a lot about from our community is the waterfront project. And we're talking about Pioneer and how there's a lot of work that needs to be done on that road. How much of that information gets transferred into a trafficked impact study that the waterfront's reviewing and or that we're responsible for because if we're already saying that this road needs some work and then that's a potential project in the future, how are those two reconciled against one another?

So a traffic impact study doesn't necessarily look at pavement distress. It looks at volumes and whether or not the intersections and the roadway will function and whether or not it'll fail service levels. that's more what those look at. As far as potential distresses that could be created from that, that's a more independent process that we'll have to look at separately.

Is there a process that we can combine that information together? I think that that, I mean, it seems like while they're siloed, they're obviously very tied together. So I think that that information, when looking at those kind of things, could be beneficial for us long-term planning. So I'm just wanting to see if that marriage can be made.

So it definitely can. We'll have to talk to the port when they're working through their process. But I don't know how geeky you want us to get But there are measurements that can be taken like with equivalent single axle loads which calculate weights and following weight deflectometers to actually check the condition of the existing pavement and then how much additional loads they could handle. There's all kinds of tests that can go in to be utilized to determine how long that lifespan of that pavement can be. So yes, they can be married up. It'll just take some communication.

So that's kind of the basis of the presentation that I went over. And Kirk and I were talking a little bit before this about, I don't know, Kirk, if you want to add anything to that as far as with the budget?

So as we're getting into the 2027 budget discussions, one of the things that we do talk about every year is the TBD budget. And you can't make decisions in a study session, but you can provide us direction of something to bring to you. What I was talking to Grant about is with him running these numbers for the next five years of what it would take to keep what council told us should be our PCI goal over the next several years. What I'd like his direction to bring back to you is currently we put 600,000 a year in for pavement preservation. We put 20,000 in for sidewalk preservation. There are other projects that we do out of the TBD fund that Grant kind of talked about, which could be the rehabbing and different things. What I would like is, do you want me to come back to you with our current plan, which is 600,000 a year, plus what he talked about in this presentation, which is around a million dollars, for you to look at at that time and then give us direction of what you want in the 2027 budget?

So, Council, we can go around and chime in on that. I guess that was a question I had written down, you know, as far as what are the priorities. So what are the things that are must-haves that you cannot live without that you need to upkeep our city roads according to our standards, and what are the things that we can give on? What I would say to that, Mr. Johnson, is that I'd like to look at all the TBD programs and be able to prioritize those. So if it is that and, and then if it's sidewalks and, and things like that, I'd love to go see that at the first pass of the budget to see where we would say, okay, this is what it's really gonna take and then we can decide this is where it's below the line or above the line or we need to keep it. Anybody else wanna jump in? We'll start with you, Lee, if you want. Okay.

I had a question of how often is the PCI number updated? Is that an annual update?

Sorry, I couldn't find the button. So yes, so in this five-year cycle that we have with a consultant, so they do 50% of our arterials and collectors each year, and they do a quarter of our locals each year. So in a four-year cycle, they'll have done 100% of our locals, and they'll have done our arterials and collectors twice. So that's how it's set up. So like I said, we get those updated every year. So it keeps our... With that cycle of doing a quarter of the locals every year, they deteriorate at a much slower rate, so it gives us a very accurate representation of what our condition of our network is. Okay, cool.

And then I agree with everything that our mayor just said as far as budgetary. Things I had written when I looked through the packet ahead of time, like just wondering what the investment gap was that exists between the 77 to the 79 and what that number would be, so it sounds like that's all within kind of that framework, so that was my main other one, I think.

So from my view, you should, I mean, if it takes a million dollars to keep it up, I think we ought to put a million dollars in the budget if we possibly can. Because otherwise, every year we just fall farther behind, right, for only doing 80%. But my other thing is, so we only put $20,000 in for sidewalks. So that is not nearly enough to do the sidewalk work that we need done, right?

Sorry. No, go ahead. I think you're going to touch. That is what was approved initially. And Grant and the capital team did come to you It was earlier this year or late last year to talk about sidewalks, mainly downtown. But that is something with the new modules that they're putting in that will give us an idea of what we need to do. So that is part of the conversation we've had as staff is to try to figure out what is the number for that as well. And one piece of data that I didn't give you is our current average sales tax that we bring into the TBD right now is between 1.1 and 1.2 million. And that is increasing each year. So that kind of gives you an idea of, like Grant said, some of these projects like Union Ridge, you have to set money aside because it's significantly more expensive. So that allows us to do that as well with meeting the goals that they have to keep our PCI up.

The other thing that I think I brought up when we were talking about the sidewalks and that I still have in my mind is that it feels to me like it would be a good practice to have like a, $100,000 in a pot set aside for emergency sidewalk repairs, that kind of thing. Instead of having to, I don't think when the sidewalk, when we get a comment from somebody that there's a really bad sidewalk, somebody's fallen, whatever, if they have, I hope they have it. But anyway, that there would be a pot of money that you could just access without having to bring it back to council. I mean, to me, that just seems crazy that you have to bring that to us for us to say, yes, please go fix that sidewalk. I think there should be a pot of money there put into the budget where you just had every authority to go do whatever it was that needed to be done. That's my opinion anyway.

One thing. Sorry.

I was saying a reserve fund besides allotment, but then have a reserve like we have on the water and all of our other funds. We have a reserve that we can reach. reach into without council action, correct?

Well, we have a reserve fund, but that doesn't mean we can just dip into it at any time. Council has to set a budget line item for us to be able to go into. I'm gonna use water as an example. We have a line item to fix the wells. We have a line item for hydrant meter, or not meters, but hydrants. That doesn't mean we use it every year, but council sets aside a budget amount that we have authority to use if council gives direction that that's what they want for this, absolutely that can be done. That's, you know, policy decision.

And that gets back to where, you know, the priorities discussion, you know, where we have funds we set aside, we budget for that. What I've heard from everybody here on council at one point or another is sidewalks are a priority. They're a priority for me. I know they're a priority for all of you. But the money is not infinite, right? And so, like, where would, you know, if we're saying we have budgeted $600,000 for, pavement preservation each year, but potentially we need to increase that because our road inventory is increasing. Where are we going, you know, what are we making a decision to say no to? But what I would rather do is just figure out how do we do what you just talked about, Judy, because I think that's highly, highly important. And I guess my next question, and Clyde, I want to allow you to ask your questions, and then I'll come back. But yeah, there are other things within that. Thank you.

I guess my question comes from a person wearing two caps, a taxpayer and a council member. It's my understanding we do not put these jobs out for bid. If we don't do that, how do we know we're getting the best price and a quality job?

Do you want me to answer that? You can add the detail, but yes, we do put everything out for bid. With the slurry seals, we piggyback onto the Vancouver contract, which they've already put it out for bid. The reason we use them and or Clark County we've used in the past is because there's a higher scale of work, so the prices go down. Legally, we have to put everything out for bid. We can't just go choose somebody to do this type of work. And Grant can add some details on that.

Yeah, so to Kirk's point, we've been piggybacking on City of Vancouver with Blackline for Slurry Seal. They have cooperative purchasing language in their contracts. I've actually talked with Ryan Miles and Camas Washougal, a whole bunch of them. The smaller agencies a lot of times will... move to use cooperative purchasing language to get basically bulk buying power with some of the larger agencies. There's actually, I sat through a FHWA training not long ago, that's actually a national trend. Because it's more, it's more, beneficial for a contractor to go bid on a contract that a bunch of agencies will actually put their quantities together and advertise together. And a contractor can go and say, wow, I can get a million square yards of slurry seal here versus going and picking up a bunch of smaller jobs. And it helps them with sequencing and timing and everything else. But to Kirk's point, so we've done that with slurry seal because we get more buying power that way. And we've actually been really pleased with the work that we've gotten from that contractor that's won that contract with them, which was through competitive bidding. All of our asphalt work that we've done, all of that gets put out to bid. So, yeah.

So just to satisfy my concern, we have quality work being done for what we're paying, and we're paying a fair price. Perfect. Thank you.

Yeah, one of the things, it may sound cliche to say, but Miranda's heard me say it a bunch of times. One of the things I really pride myself on is being a steward of the taxpayers' dollars because not only am I working for the city, I also pay taxes as well. And so I always want to ensure that the taxpayers are getting the best bang for their buck, so to speak, and something that's going to last. It's one of the reasons why we use the cooperative purchasing is to increase our buying power. And now if we were doing that and we had a contractor that we weren't getting good work, I wouldn't do that. But we've been pleased with the quality of work that we've gotten for the cost.

Thank you. Grant, a tremendous presentation. But I have some concerns along with Clyde. Number one is I think we should be going out for bids because CAMAS, Washougal, Battleground, Lay Centre used to piggyback on top of Vancouver. They don't do it anymore. They went on their own and they found out it's cheaper than piggybacking on top of Vancouver. So I think personally that we need to turn around and be stewards of our finances and do some checking outside because of how they've turned around and went. The other thing that was just brought up, if I didn't, I had lost it out of my mind there for a minute. Oh, I guess it was Union Ridge Parkway. You said that there was part of it that was going to be a full rebuild and then sections of it that aren't. It looks like to me that the whole thing needs almost to be as alligator-ed as it is. It's in bad shape, but it's been there a number of years, and it does have a thinner, if you want to say, base than what the streets do today. And with that, I guess, open for comment or whatever. Oh, and the other thing was, I think we should consider the million dollars on preservations. of increasing the amount to that, it is only prudent to turn around and cost saving to turn around and take care of it today rather than taking care of it tomorrow. Okay, I'm through for now.

So I can speak quickly to Union Ridge Parkway, some of the questions you had on that. So we have designers right now, consultants that are working on the design of that. We've done a multitude of things of taking course through the road down into the road base and the subgrade below that to evaluate it. They used what's called an FWD or a falling weight deflectometer, which measures strength and resiliency of your base and your sub base under the road as well as your asphalt. So what we're trying to do is evaluate which areas are actually need full depth reclamation. So where we remove the asphalt, we go down and we cement treat and there's other areas where based on all of the testing and what we're showing are strong enough that we can grind out asphalt and do an inlay over that which will save us money. Um, we're also looking at being extremely creative. I'm working with, uh, the consultants on this, um, at using what's called a high mod asphalt or a fiber reinforced asphalt, um, which we can actually narrow down and thin down our asphalt section because they're stronger and they're more resilient. So we're exploring all avenues on that because I've told them I want this road to outlast me in the city of Ridgefield. And then some, so we're, we're looking at how, how best to, to, minimize costs on that while giving the best value and the best product that we can to get to hold up to all the truck traffic.

The fiber enhanced asphalt, when I built my house 35 years ago, I put a fiber in the concrete in the garage floor and we have no cracks after 35 years. It's one of the things that fiber really helps with. Yeah, really, really help. There was one other question I had, but I'll have to let it go. They lost it.

And I'll just real quickly to your point on the bidding out, like on slurry seals, chip seals, et cetera. I'm also, just to give you guys some background information, I'm a vice chair on the Northwest Pavement Management Association. Ryan Miles is the program chair for the NWPMA. And so I have contacts frequently with all of my counterparts at all of the other agencies and we talk routinely. We're, in the slurry seal category, we're getting one of the best prices that we can get. I shop at, I talk to contractors, I'm constantly looking at new cutting edge treatments that are coming out, be it asphalt rubber chip seal, be it, there's a multitude of new technologies all the time that are coming out that I look into, I evaluate, I talk with the vendors, I talk with the contractors, our other agency partners, and I mean, we'll routinely go out and see demos of an agency saying, hey, I'm going to, like, if I do high mod asphalt on Union Ridge Parkway, if that ends up being the alternative that looks the best for us, I'm going to invite all of our partner agencies to come out and see it put down and And we routinely do that back and forth with other agencies. Have we ever used any of them? The new ones? Yeah. Okay. Yep. The Pioneer Canyon Drive and Heron, we used an asphalt rubber chip seal with a contractor, Doolittle, from up north. They actually take crumb tire rubber from recycled tires that goes into the plant, and it's kind of a unique process, but it holds up a little bit better than a traditional chip seal. Do you want to talk? Yeah, Mastic's another one. We're actually going to be using Mastic this year. Mastic is kind of like a really souped-up crack seal, I'll just say. You'll see some of it. If you come off Fairgrounds exit down to 179th, that intersection's always been really rough. You'll see some new blacker tar material in those ruts. That's Mastic. Mastic holds up a lot better than crack seal over time. So we're looking at... I don't know if you've driven in front of the Rourke lately, but on Hillhurst, there's a seam that's opening up through there that is a lot bigger than what crack seal can handle, but mastic will be a perfect application for that so we can seal that up, keep moisture out of our road base, and preserve that road and keep it going.

I got one last thing. I still got the floor, correct? You sure do, sir. No. The question is, with Union Ridge Parkway, you're talking about different sections, different things. Hillhurst 9th was done a few years ago. And there's a 100-yard section before you get to Cemetery Road. It's like a cobblestone road. They did part here, and they did the part up here. And that 100-yard section, if it's 100 yards, might be 200 feet or whatever. It's like driving over a cobblestone road between the two fixes and that. I don't want to see something like that on Union Ridge Parkway.

So I can just quickly speak to that. So prior to my time here at the city, uh, Hillhurst, the hill up through cemetery and the area between, uh, ninth and cemetery, that was a cement treat job that was done on that. I had it actually a lot of conversations with Brian Cass when I got here, I'd be like, what happened? Um, The section that I was involved with that we did on Hillhurst was from 9th South, all the good parts, the stuff that's smooth. Of course. So those were two totally different projects that you're right. When I drive down Hillhurst, I don't enjoy that either because you come off nice and smooth. And then you hit the rough bumpy that, um, that was cement treated. And I, I can, I can assume that I know what happened when that was built because symmetry, you've got to know what you're doing and when you grade it out to get it to work. Um, but yeah, I think we need to do a patch job.

Okay.

Um, I, I know there's a few more questions, so we're going to just kind of go around this way. Uh, you know, yeah, just go around the horn.

Yeah.

I just have a comment, Mr. Johnson, when you, when you're saying like some options to bring back to us, I know that we don't have an abundance of finances and making sure that we're good stewards of where we're taking from things to make sure, you know, if we're going to fill a bucket, what are we taking away from? And I want to know what we may be taking away from if that is the case.

So the TBD fund is a sales tax that's for payment preservation. It can be used on pavement preservation. It could be used to maintain sections of roadway, right-of-way maintenance, even street lights and things. We did some research this year on what we can use it for. It can be used on bike lanes. It can be used on sidewalks, trails, things like that. Striping, that's another thing that we're using it for in a striping program. It can only be used for that funding. And this is a sales tax that everybody who shops within Ridgefield pays. It's not borne on the backs of just Ridgefield residents. Biggest reason why council chose to use that funding source. It's not taking away from things like parks or public safety or things like that because it has a specific restricted purpose that it can be used for. We are trying to see if we can't use a little bit more of that funding for some of the things that the street maintenance fund is using. That'll be something brought to council. But it also depends. We don't want to take away from the preservation program either. So we'll look at that, and with what Grant is doing in Street Savers, he's looking not only at just doing those preservation projects, but also what projects do need to be rehabbed and putting that into the long-term plans so that part of that million dollars does include some more projects that are a little bit more intensive and will be costing a little bit more. So that's all part of this plan over the long term.

So I have a question. I need an explanation. And I don't think I'm stepping outside of my authority, because I talked with Mr. Stewart about this. And he gave me an explanation as I was walking out the door, and I couldn't write it down. So I have a board member who lives on Hall and who has, for the last three years, talked about how difficult that street is and how much it needs to be done, and as does Elm. She told me today that Elm is worse. Steve told me, again, that it had been put off for another year, and she had heard that, and the neighborhood is up in arms about it. So I'm not, I mean, I guess I'm not sure how we, how do we, what do we, how do we approach things like that when you have a couple streets in the downtown that are just, you know, such a mess, and it maybe not is in your program?

Yeah, so Holland Elm is a fun one for us.

Yes.

It definitely has a lot of challenges yesterday, It has a lot of challenges. I have multiple thoughts going through my head at the same time. I was out there yesterday with our project manager, Kristen. So the project is in design right now. We're working through figuring out the timeline of what happened between 2023 and 2025. That's kind of the gap. So the project was awarded in 23. We're figuring out when it actually got obligated, which usually takes, you know, it can take six months to a year before it actually gets obligated. And then there's steps that have to be gone through for procuring the services for design, the professional services. So I have a sneaking suspicion all of that was in that timeframe, but I haven't nailed it down yet to provide to you. But since then, so the CDBG program is where we got those funds to do that work.

What does CDBG stand for?

Community...

Yes.

And so...

So the CDBG funds take a while to get, but then there's also a lot of what I'm going to call strings attached to that. So there's a lot of requirements that you have to jump through to be able to expend those funds. The program itself, how it is ran, they requested that we wait to submit Hall and Elm until they had finished reviewing G Creek Loop, which was also CDBG funds.

And that was just being paid today, correct?

That is being worked on currently, yes. But there's a biological assessment process that has to happen that is quite lengthy because of the fun type. And that was one of the things that had to happen on Cheek Creek Loop, and now it has to happen on Holland Elm. So that is actually being – it's not done by us. It is actually done by – Clark, thank you. I'm like, I don't know exactly who's doing it. I know it's Rebecca, but I wasn't exactly sure which ones you had. Thank you. So they take care of that themselves. And then they let us know when we're allowed to move forward with the project. So as far as the design goes, we have to wait for the outcome of that biological assessment to figure out what our next steps are and what we need to incorporate into the project. So we're roughly 80% designed. And to get to 100%, we have to get that detail from Rebecca Royce on where they are and what the additional requirements, if any, are going to be for the project. So in the meantime, there's lots of other things that we're having to look at on the project, like driveways. What is actually legal down there? Do we have any standards? Because as you all know, driveways are a variable topic down there, and they're in a lot of different shapes and sizes and locations. So we want to make sure that we're following all of the rules, city code, dotting our I's, crossing our T's, making sure that we're doing everything right so nothing comes back later and says, wait, why did you only give them a 12-foot driveway when it should have been 24? Those types of things. So that's what we're doing in the meantime. But we do have to wait on Rebecca Royce to be able to move forward. Go ahead, Grant.

One other thing that I would add to that, because everything Miranda said is 100% correct. The other thing that was a challenge with that is right as we started into the design is when the port stocks and cleanup was happening in the same area, which impacted our design because we had to realize what they're doing, which it all cascades down and has effects on our biological review, environmental review that we do with the county with HUD. And that had impact on that as well as our design.

So I guess I think that you should probably have a meeting with the people that live on that street so that they fully understand. I mean, I understand what you're saying, but I'm definitely not happy about it because we should not tell people in 2023 that we are going to pave their street, which they have actually been buying gravel for themselves. And here it is. I mean, I'm sorry I'm raising my voice. It's nothing to do with you. And then tell them, oh, no, this really isn't going to happen for five more years. I mean, these people are really, really upset.

So I can add a little bit to that. So we have spoken with every homeowner around that project and even outside of that project down there. Kristen, that's the project manager on that. and myself, we've spoken to all the homeowners, and I know a lot of the homeowners that you're speaking of, and talk to them and explain to them what we're trying to do, because at the end of the day, we want to get it right, and we want to do it right, and we want them to be pleased with it, and it was explaining to them the challenges and the hoops that Miranda explained that we have to jump through with the funding source and the different studies and everything that has to happen Unfortunately, it takes time. I met with them before we even had CDBG funds. And it was, you'd seen from the map, there's a lot of the downtown area that I wanted to start doing of those 20% to go do something. The challenge is, without having storm drainage down there, it was, well, let's partner with CDBG and we can fix our water line, we can add storm drainage, we can put curbs in. Because the challenge that we have, if I went down there on Hall and I pulverized the road down some base rock and paved it we're going to be getting calls and complaints that everybody's yard is a lake because that's where all the water is going to go okay so and i explained that to a lot of them down there and they kind of understood that okay like you get it's more than just paving our road so yes we've had a lot of conversations with them down there so can we put temporary gravel down or anything at all to get them through the winter or So we have had our maintenance crews have went down there and put down gravel and graded out areas. So we're constantly working with them. If we hear from them that they need something, we'll send our maintenance crews out there to evaluate it. Thank you very much.

Yep. Just a quick question for my own edification. Once a contractor comes in and puts down whatever they put down, Do we have any kind of a warranty on that so that in four months you drive down the street and there's a big bare spot here or the product is gone over here? Just for my own information.

So yeah, good question. Yes, a standard warranty on pretty much any resurfacing project we do is a year. There's times that we'll extend that warranty. We'll work with a contractor to extend it. It can sometimes cost a little more for that, but a standard is one year on pretty much everything we do.

Thank you.

Any other questions for staff pertaining to pavement preservation and management? I'll just throw in there, just as a last note, we kind of talked about it, the priorities, and we're going into budget season. What I suspect is that council, I'm not going to speak for all of you, but we might be a little bit more conservative on our budget this year. And I guess the word for me is efficiency. So where are the efficiencies we can be? And I really appreciate you both speaking to that, because that is something that is a priority for us. Because again, things we say no, we say yes to one thing. means we might be saying no to another thing. And we want to make sure that we keep our levels of service, at least from my end, keeping the high level of service that we have. And that includes roads. That includes places like Hall and Elm, where we can take care of those streets all the way around. And then look at things like sidewalks and lighting as well, and then the multimodal areas as well. Because I know that it's all a priority, but it can't all be a priority. So we just got to figure out where that is. And so as we look at that, I guess, Kirk, You talked about TBD, and there's certain things that it can be allocated to. So when we talk about prioritizing that, looking at that and saying, here's what the options are for TBD, and here's how you might initially come to prioritize, and then that gives us a whole look, the whole picture of where we can place those. And then from your end, too, just looking at what are the efficiencies there? Because I think you guys do an incredible job right now. And I've been... doing planning commission interviews all week. And what I keep talking about is our level of service and the quality of work that we do here. And we've got to keep that up. And you let it go one year, and then you spend the next five years doing catch up on it. So we see that. We appreciate the work that you do and the thoughtfulness in it. But we want to make sure that we're efficient with the budget. Anything else for the good of the order? OK. Anything from your end? Are we good? OK. Thank you all again today for the presentation. This is really helpful. It's interesting. This will conclude our study session, and then we will resume at a council meeting on June 23rd. Thank you very much.