Study finds Valley roads are in good shape

Thanks to decades of sewer construction, Spokane Valley’s roads are in good shape. And after six months of inspecting every foot of asphalt in the city, a team of consultants briefed the City Council Tuesday on forming a plan to help keep them that way.

“This is Christmas early. This is what I have been looking forward to for a couple years,” said Councilman Mike DeVleming after a presentation on the city’s new pavement management program.

Discussion on road-surface repairs might induce a few yawns in the audience at City Hall, but the plans have been highly anticipated among the elected leaders who have to figure out every year how best to spend limited dollars on seemingly unlimited road work.

“What a pavement management program can do is predict the future,” said Chuck Larson of J-U-B Engineers, Inc.

The city launched the $435,000 study six months ago because it wants to keep up with repairs to prevent bigger, more-costly problems. The way pavement decays, the cost of fixing it increases exponentially the longer it is put off. Often a simpler repair – like a grind and overlay after 75 percent of the road’s useful life – will cost a fraction of replacing a road entirely just five years later.

“The good news is you are in a great spot to start from,” Larson told the council.

His firm’s work so far shows that well over half the roads in the city are rated “excellent” or “very good,” with relatively few falling into categories below “fair”.

Most of the city has been repaved in the last 20 years after sewer lines were installed as part of the Septic Tank Elimination Program.

The rest of that project – as well as data on city budget predictions, accidents, traffic counts, bus routes, freight movements, road capacity and several other variables – will all be brought together in a database with the street conditions during the next four to six months.

The end result will allow Spokane Valley engineers to calculate which repairs need to be done – and when – to keep the roads in decent shape at the lowest cost. Combining all of the data and updating it every year will give the city a much better idea of how streets are used, what they can handle and which projects might be the most eligible for grants. Council members also asked if the system’s software will allow them to make the street maintenance information available to the public on the city’s Web site.

The program is intertwined with mapping technology known as geographic information systems that makes it easy to call up the information online, the consultants said.

It’s possible that residents some day could even type in their address and bring up everything they might want to know about the road in front of their house, including when and how the city plans to maintain it.