Cape struggles to repair its failing streets; one-fourth were in poor shape in 2014

The city of Cape Girardeau plans to spend $11 million over five years to fix its crumbling streets, but city manager Scott Meyer said that won’t be enough to address all the potholes.

City officials estimated in 2014 about a fourth of the city’s 233 miles of pavement were in poor shape.

City leaders vowed to address the problem as part of the Transportation Trust Fund sales tax, which voters in 2015 extended for another five years.

The tax is projected to generate more than $20 million over five years for a range of transportation projects, including sidewalks and streetlights as well as new construction.

Fixing roads accounts for about half of that amount.

Meyer suggested city officials may have to look to budget about $15 million over five years for street repairs if voters extend the transportation sales tax in 2020.

City residents at recent strategic plan meetings held in each of the city’s wards, pleaded for city officials to fix their failing roads.

City council members also have talked of the need to fix crumbing streets.

“You are going to see us take care of what we’ve got,” Ward 5 Councilman Bob Fox told residents at a public meeting earlier this month.

Cape Girardeau’s investment in fixing city streets has helped address the problem, but the current spending level is not enough to eliminate the potholes, Meyer said.

Three years ago, officials estimated the city government would have to spend more than $28 million over five years to fully fix the already-deteriorated city streets.

The city’s overall transportation costs continue to climb. In a 10-year period ending in 2014, the city’s street department budget rose from $1.1 million to more than $2.7 million, according to Meyer.

While the city has succeeded in fixing some of the more deteriorated streets, other roads continue to fall apart.

“You have other roads that are failing,” Meyer said.

Overall, the condition of city streets is expected to continue declining over the next three years, he said.

Many of the failing roads are residential streets that were built during the booming development of subdivisions in the 1980s and ’90s, Meyer said.

Those streets now are 30 years old, he added.

But age alone doesn’t tell the whole story.

Meyer, a former state highway district engineer, said the city did not require developers back then to put in a gravel base when they built roads.

“In my opinion, that was a mistake,” he said. “We should have been requiring that all along.”

When Meyer became city manager in 2009, he implemented regulations requiring new streets to be built on a four-inch gravel base instead of directly on compacted ground.

The lack of solid foundations on many streets has aggravated the situation, Meyer said.

When there is no base and water penetrates through the cracks, the erosion results in the concrete collapsing, he said.

When concrete streets start failing, they do so quickly, he added.

Those now-substandard streets are “going to haunt us for a generation or two,” Meyer said.

If the city had been able to fix the cracking pavements early, it would have been less costly and the repairs would have been less extensive, he said.

But the city did not have the money to make solid repairs to potholed streets at the time, Meyer said.

“When you have thousands of those, it is overwhelming,” he said. “That is exactly what we were experiencing.”

The city tried to address the problem with temporary asphalt patches. Meyer said that amounted to putting a “Band-Aid” on the problem.

“You are not really resolving the problem,” he added, comparing it to putting a Band-Aid on a broken leg.

Two-thirds of Cape Girardeau’s streets are concrete pavement. The other third are paved with asphalt, according to city officials.

Both types of pavement hold up well if they are properly maintained, Meyer said.

Not all Cape Girardeau streets are in poor shape, he said.

City officials rated 75 percent of the streets in fair or better condition in 2014.

“It is not horrible,” Meyer said.

But he said there still are many streets plagued with crumbling pavement that make for a bumpy ride.

mbliss@semissourian.com

(573) 388-3641