Quick Take
Santa Cruz County supervisors are disagreeing with most of the findings of a civil grand jury report on the poor condition of county roads, but say they plan to implement some of the group’s recommendations for better transparency and more robust funding of road repairs.
The Santa Cruz County civil grand jury released the county board of supervisors’ and the Local Agency Formation Commission of Santa Cruz County’s (LAFCO) responses to its evaluation of the county roads — and showed that the two groups largely disagreed with those findings.
LAFCOs are regional service planning agencies located in all of California’s 58 counties. They have regulatory and planning powers as well as oversee government agencies and their service areas.
A civil grand jury report from June heavily criticized the current state of the county’s roads — it said that 63% of county roads are in poor to failed condition while budgets for repairs remain inadequate. The report — “Santa Cruz County Local Roads: A smooth path to paradise or a hell of a highway?”— said the county is in a cycle of prioritizing roads that are already in decent condition because the work for those is less expensive, while roads in worse condition fall further into disrepair.
The board of supervisors either “partially disagreed” or “disagreed” with all of the civil grand jury’s findings. First, it partially disagreed with the civil grand jury’s finding that underfunding of road and culvert maintenance has resulted in a backlog of deferred maintenance and hazardous travel conditions. The board of supervisors said that the county is “systematically underfunded compared to county peers and statewide county averages,” due to a number of state choices about property tax regulations and its decision to send online sales tax from local purchases to locations with warehouses.
The board also partially disagreed with the civil grand jury’s finding that the county public works department prioritizes pavement preservation over restoration because of a large funding deficit. The board said that public works uses industrywide accepted pavement management practices that allow “the most efficient use of scarce resources,” and that the board is regularly caught up on funding proposals.
The supervisors pushed back on the civil grand jury’s finding that road maintenance strategies differ by supervisor district, and said that maintenance decisions are made independent of any political boundaries. They also “partially disagreed” with the finding that serious road failures caused by 2017 and 2023 storms were exacerbated by inadequate infrastructure maintenance. They said that while the board agrees that the condition of infrastructure did contribute to the resulting damage from storms, the report did not appropriately “attribute factors such as age and the increasing pressure of climate change-driven disasters on the county’s transportation network.”
The board partially disagreed with the notion that the county has not asked unincorporated voters to increase the funding to Special Service District 9D, one of four districts that divide the entire unincorporated county into north, mid and south sections. These typically charge a special tax to the residents within the district boundaries to fund repairs in the corresponding section. The board also outright disagreed with the assertion that the county hasn’t performed resurfacing maintenance on many smaller unincorporated local roads.
While the board plans to make a more serious effort to ask voters about their feelings on a proposed special tax increase, it said that the county has resurfaced about a sixth of its road network between 2018 and 2023, calling the civil grand jury’s evaluation “entirely without merit.” It also said that the county has spent $350 million on roads in the past seven fiscal years, but faces serious challenges in improving pavement conditions, including difficult geography, roads that were originally not built for long-term use, and scarce funding.
The supervisors also said that while the board acknowledges that existing funds do not sufficiently maintain county roads to the extent they would like, public works secured more than $30 million for a number of Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission (RTC) projects and the Soquel Drive Buffered Bike Lane and Congestion mitigation project. The board does not consider these substantial investments “minor.”
LAFCO, on the other hand, “partially agreed” with the civil grand jury’s evaluation that seeking and securing additional funding sources to repair the road network has only seen “minor progress.”
A letter signed by LAFCO executive director Joe Serrano said that while the agency knows the county has sought out additional funding opportunities, “there is a lack of transparency on how these efforts are initiated, what funding sources are available, and why certain revenues are granted or denied.”
Despite its formal disagreement with findings, the board of supervisors plans to implement a number of civil grand jury recommendations. Those include a public works report identifying culvert and drainage repair needs by June 2025, giving LAFCO spending details for each of the special service districts, and moving toward a tax increase to Special Service District 9D.
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Check out our Carmageddon road delay list here. This week, pay particular attention to:
- The on-ramp to southbound Highway 1 from Bay Avenue in Capitola will be closed for two months to allow construction crews to adjust the roadway elevation in line with the bus-on-shoulder lane. Drivers can take a detour north on Porter Street to Soquel Drive, then east to Park Avenue, where they can rejoin Highway 1. They may also head south on Bay Avenue to Park Avenue, and rejoin southbound Highway 1 there. The RTC expects the ramp to reopen on Nov. 29.
- Shoulder work will shut down alternating lanes at various sections of Highway 9 between 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Wednesday. Those sections are between upper Glen Arbor Road and Route 9, Main Street and Route 9, Fillmore Avenue and Route 9, and Hillside Avenue/Miles Street and Mill Street.
- Through the end of 2024, various sections of Soquel Drive between State Park Drive and Paul Sweet Road could be reduced to one lane of traffic as the Soquel Drive Buffered Bike Lane and Congestion Mitigation Project moves forward. It includes new bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, adaptive traffic signals and updated sidewalks and curbs. The sections of road will be intermittently closed as work continues at multiple sites. Specifically, look out for intermittent single lane closures between 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.
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