The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors is proposing to spend $8.6 million to fix about 40 miles of roads that are in dire need of repair and are considered important to tourism and agriculture.
The priority roads represent less than 3 percent of the 1,382-mile county-maintained network, a system that has consistently ranked at the bottom of Bay Area road condition surveys.
County officials say that within the next month they will release a long-term plan that contemplates a range of options, including new or additional taxes, to improve the entire network.
In the interim, they are set to discuss this year's pavement preservation spending at the supervisors' regular meeting on Tuesday.
The deteriorating road network across much of the county is a factor of years of reduced state and federal funding, including declining gas tax revenues, and shrinking local revenues, coupled with the increased costs of raw materials.
"We do as much as we can with the funds that we have," said Tom O'Kane, deputy director of the county Public Works Department. "Decades of neglect aren't going to go away with a few allocations of $8 million."
The county previously estimated its road network has a maintenance backlog of more than $920 million.
The 14 roads slated for repairs this year are mostly main thoroughfares spread out around the county, including 2.3 miles of River Road, 3 miles of Petaluma Hill Road and 1 mile of Arnold Drive.
Last year, the county was able to improve 5 percent of its road network with $20 million, more than half of which came from a federal grant. Federal funds are not available this year, O'Kane said.
Rural residents of the county who live on roads that have long been in disrepair have lobbied for more attention for the lesser-traveled byways.
Craig Harrison, a resident of Sonoma Mountain Road and co-founder of the advocacy group Save Our Sonoma Roads, said the list of roads proposed for repair this year does not include many of the residential roads that badly need attention.
"I'm sure that all of the roads on the list need to be repaired," he said. The problem is the vast legion of roads that need to be repaired that are not on the list."
He said he doubted the proposed work would do much to improve the county's low scores on pavement condition.
In the last report from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the county's residential roads received a score of 34 out of 100, by far the worst in the Bay Area.
"There are a thousand miles of roads that are still in bad shape," said Michael Troy, a Lichau Road resident and co-founder of SOS Roads. "They're just addressing a small part of it. The real question is when we will have a strategy to get attention for the whole network."
Supervisor David Rabbitt said the board will unveil a 20-year road rehabilitation plan soon. He said some options for roads funding being discussed include a sales tax measure that would go before voters and creation of special road maintenance districts that would raise additional revenue through property assessments.
"Right now, everything is in the mix," he said. "We're closer to having the final long-term plan."
(You can reach Staff Writer Matt Brown at 521-5206 or matt.brown@pressdemocrat.com.)
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