Copperas Cove city council hears street condition report during retreat

By BRITTANY FHOLER
Cove Leader-Press

Nearly a year after the Copperas Cove City Council approved authorizing an agreement with Lockwood, Andrews and Newnam, Inc. (LAN) for a street condition assessment, the council members heard a report on the findings of the city’s Pavement Condition Index assessment during a retreat meeting held Friday. 
Hossein Roshani, project manager with Lockwood, Andrews & Newnam, Inc. (LAN), presented the findings from the city’s first pavement condition index assessment during the council’s retreat meeting held in the Bernie Beck Lecture Hall at the Texas A&M University- Central Texas’ Founders’ Hall. 
LAN, including Roshani, drove each of the city’s streets between June and August of 2021, evaluating each segment to put together their recommendation for the report. 
The total of 1,583 street segments make up 153.92 center-line miles, with a total average width of 30.16 feet and a total area of 2,677,659 surface yards. 
This equals to the distance between Copperas Cove to Oklahoma City, according to Roshani. 
Each segment is rated on a scale of zero to 100, with zero being the worst and 100 being the best condition. 
More than half of Copperas Cove’s 153.92 center-line miles of road are in the poor or failed category, coming in with a score of 55 or below. 
A total of 34.6 percent of Copperas Cove’s streets are in “poor” condition, with a PCI of 41-55, while another 16.8 percent are considered to be in failed condition, with a PCI of 0-40. 
Only 12.8 percent of the road network is in excellent condition with a PCI of 86 to 100, and just 19.5 percent are in good condition with a PCI of 71-85. Approximately 16.3 percent are in fair condition, with a PCI of 56-70. 
The PCI index map shows where the road segments are located and identifies their PCI value via color. The bulk of Copperas Cove’s inner roads, which are also the older roads, have a PCI of 55 or less. 
The network average of the asphalt road segments surveyed was calculated to have an approximate PCI of 60 at the time of collection, which indicates that the roadway network as a whole is generally in ‘Fair’ condition, according to Roshani. 
Fixing the entire City’s pavement network all at once would cost about $52.4 million, but Roshani said that this number was for network analysis only, as this would not be cost effective because the final PCI would be 95 to 100, and the goal for cities the size of Copperas Cove is to have a PCI of at least 70, while reducing the number of failed segments with a PCI of 40 or less. 
Roshani presented council members with three different budget scenarios for increased street repairs and a maintenance regiment over the next five years. 
To obtain a target PCI of 65 by the end of 2026, an annual budget of at least $4.6 million would be required. 
“I wanted to run a scenario where Copperas Cove might achieve a PCI of 70 in five years, but that’s not really possible,” Roshani said.
To maintain the city’s current PCI of 60 by the end of 2026, the required budget would need to be at least $3.6 million per year. The city’s current budget for street maintenance and repairs is just over $1.7 million. 
The city’s budget $1.7 million consists of $1.2 million from Capital Improvement projects and nearly $500,000 in the coffers, collected from 1/8-cent of sales tax revenue. 
If the city does nothing and just maintains its current budget, the network’s PCI score will fall to 51.3 by 2026. 
The Pavement Condition Report concludes that while the current pavement preservation and rehabilitation treatments being used by the Public Works Department are being applied correctly, the number of projects, which are dependent on the budget available, are “not sufficient to improve or maintain the current condition of the network.”
Public Works Director Scott Osburn told the council that the city needs to do more. 
“Based on the resources we have, we are losing the battle,” he added. 
Osburn said the city’s streets system had been neglected with maintenance, as reflected in some of the calculations in the report.
Back in 2016, voters first approved allocating 1/8-cent of sales tax revenue to be diverted to a Street Maintenance Fund for street maintenance purposes. 
“Flash forward to today, we’re actually getting projects out,” Osburn said. He pointed to the repairs on Big Divide, Colorado, Skyline, Freedom and more. 
“As we go forward, this will be a challenge to maintain this asset, similar to your water, your sewer, your drainage infrastructure, but this tool, this assessment is going to give our team…the ability to actually manage that asset rather than just kind of guess at it, which is largely the approach that has kind of been taken in the past to develop these work plans and get us forward,” Osburn added. 
Council members discussed which direction to go, with most in favor of increasing the PCI somehow. 
“The pavements are going downhill all the time, just like a roof, so if we don’t have a consistent program to prevent their sliding to the less than 40s, if we think that we can just do it in one or two or three or four or five years, we’re going to lose, but it’s going to take doing the right things,” said Councilmember Jay Manning. 
Manning added that the city will have to improve its inspection of developments and cited past subdivisions that had asphalt laid when it should have been stopped by the inspector. 
Osburn said that the city has recently hired a construction inspector with 50 years of experience who has improved the city’s efforts and added that the city is “leaps and bounds from where we were probably even two years ago.”
Mayor Dan Yancey said the question that the council is facing is whether council needs to work on funding plans to meet these needs. 
“Our residents in the survey that was done said they were prepared to pay to offset, pay more for roads, based on the survey that I read,” said Councilmember Dianne Campbell. 
“I think we do need to look at a transportation fee or funding plan of some sort, so that we can catch up and then eventually get to the point where we’re keeping pace,” said Councilmember Fred Chavez. 
Chavez added that he felt the city should look at improving the PCI over a period of six or seven years and find ways to get the PCI higher while being innovative in getting funding. 
“It’s critical,” Chavez said. “It’s an area of interest to the citizens and my posterior – so it gets bumpy.”
Manning pointed out the chart Roshani had shown, which demonstrated that the higher the PCI level, the less it would be to maintain. 
“We need to move back up in the 70, 75 at some point, because then it will be less expensive to maintain the pavement we have than where we are now,” Manning said. 
When asked if he felt the city needed to focus on achieving a higher PCI sooner, Manning said no, because the budget would not support that. 
“Consistency is what I think what we need to do, and a little bit of wisdom to know that what we’re spending it for is actually producing so that we keep reevaluating are we headed in the right direction, in my opinion,” Manning said. 
Yancey said that he felt the issue is really with the budget. 
“We want to get to 70, and how long will it take to get to that?” Yancey asked. “That’s really kind of the bottom line.”
Roshani explained that raising the PCI from 60 to 65 costs an estimated $4.6 million per year but raising it from 65 to 70 would cost less, and furthermore, maintaining a network with a PCI of 70 would cost less. 
Yancey said that he was appreciative of having this information. 
“Having a road map like this is absolutely invaluable,” he said. “There is a level of confidence there that if we can work to get to those points of where we want to be, then we should be in pretty good shape. I think that’s huge.”
Overall consensus from council was initially to look into improving the city’s road network’s PCI to 65, over a period of five years and then what it would look like to get to 70 over a period of eight to 10 years, and where funding would come from. 
“Let’s look at trying to put it together at 70 percent PCI and how long would it take to do that, and how much, per year,” Yancey said. “I’m thinking the more cost effective would be to try to get to that over a whatever period of time it would be fiscally prudent to do that.”