The city is looking for answers as to why street repairs are taking so long to accomplish and what can be done to expedite them.

By Josie Grove

“When is my street going to be paved?”

Ward 5 alderman Mark Niedergang says it’s one of the most common questions he hears from his constituents. “And I still don’t know what to say.

The city has little information available about when and where street repairs will happen, and has yet to present any kind of comprehensive plan for street maintenance to the Board of Aldermen or with the public. Other than plans for major street projects, such as the reconstruction of Beacon Street, there is not much current information of any kind readily available about Somerville’s 93 miles of streets.

That is why at last Thursday’s meeting of the Board of Aldermen, Niedergang requested that the Director of Engineering find a way to make the city’s street repair plans more transparent.

“That the Director of Engineering explain to this Board how to find out when a particular street is scheduled to be re-paved, or provide a document that has the city’s street paving list and date for when each street is next scheduled to be re-paved. (3rd request)

“Is there a master list? Is there a phasing list?” Niedergang asked. He has yet to see one, despite having asked the Director of Engineering for this information twice before.

Ward 3 alderman Robert McWatters reminded the Board that the city administration was supposed to provide them a five-year plan for street repair. “They had a specific plan and they were supposed to inform this board,” he said. McWatters and Niedergang saw that report as incomplete. “The city engineer gave us very detailed information about some streets, but not all streets,” said Niedergang.

Alderman Bill White speculated that some streets may not have been included in that list because their condition was not poor enough to justify repaving. Niedergang then proposed a system by which Somerville residents could appeal that logic and the Department of Public Works for the repair of specific streets, or at least for the inclusion of specific streets in a master repair plan. “If a street is not on the list, it may be appropriate, but there should be some process where it could be looked at and appealed,” he said.

The administration did produce a document in 2013 that detailed the previous decade of repairs. Thirty-five miles–more than one third–of Somerville’s streets were repaired between 2004 and 2014. But little has been discussed since.

The request for a repair schedule has plenty of precedent in other larger cities.  Other cities have various systems in place to track street improvements. The city of Boston, for example, maintains a list of streets slated for repaving on its Department of Public Works website, but only a handful of the repair sites listed have estimated start dates. Philadelphia organizes its plans week by week, creating a list of street repair projects to be undertaken in any given week.

Cities vary in their approach to which streets will be repaved and resurfaced first. Last year, the city of Cleveland, Ohio began ranking its streets from worst to best, and is focusing its resources on repairing streets in poor condition first. The city of Los Angeles is taking the opposite approach: most of its resources are focused on maintaining the streets in the best condition, and slowly repairing the worse-off ones. The city of Somerville offers no such reasoning about why it repairs certain streets and not others.

“It would be nice to get some kind of guidance about what to tell constituents about their streets,” said Niedergang. The issue will go to the Board of Aldermen’s Department of Public Utilities and Public Works committee for further discussion.