The Road to Zero Degradation

Martin Luther King Blvd, Dallas. Source: Google.

The City of Dallas has bond proposals on its ballot in the May 4, 2024, election. Proposition A will ask voters to approve "$521 million in bond money to repair streets, alleys, sidewalks, bridges and other transportation-related infrastructure over five years." That sounds like a lot. It isn't. It's not even enough to keep up. The Dallas Morning News has the details.

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Dallas public works officials told City Council members in February the average pavement conditions of Dallas roads are projected to dip from “good” to “fair” by 2028 without a significant boost of investment. That is despite plans for the city to spend $413 million on road maintenance over the next five years and designs to devote close to half of the proposed $1.25 billion bond money for streets.

The city would have to come up with an extra $125 million a year to achieve zero degradation -- or keep up streets as they are, Shahad Mohammed, a public works department program administrator, said during a Feb. 21 City Council meeting. It’s not clear where the extra money would come from.

She said the public works department’s funding projections show the city spending an estimated $816 million in general fund and bond money for streets over five years. To hit zero degradation, the city would need $1.36 billion over the same time period.

“Zero degradation remains a great goal, but it is somewhat difficult to achieve in reality with a network of our size,” Mohammed told council members in February. “But it still has to be our goal to reduce the backlog and reduce the degradation of our network as much as possible and increase our investments.”

Source: Dallas Morning News.

What are Dallasites' options? In the short run, raising taxes is the only thing that can keep Dallas streets from degrading further. In the long run, increasing density would add more tax revenue. That would allow spending more on street maintenance without raising tax rates. Dallas is working on that front. Forward Dallas "is the citywide visionary plan that establishes guidelines for how public and private land should be used and what the city should look like." But there's opposition to increasing density. Without tax rate hikes or increased density, further degradation of streets is an inevitability in Dallas's future.

What's the story in Richardson? Richardson has its own planning underway, called Envision Richardson, for an update to its Comprehensive Plan. I don't have the numbers for Richardson for how much money is needed for so-called Zero Degradation in Richardson, but it's a lot. The tradeoffs are the same as in Dallas. Mayor Pro Tem Arefin gets it, saying in a recent City Council meeting, "We have to have revenue from new sources to get our infrastructure fixes." Richardson has the option of increasing density to get those new sources of tax revenue to allow spending more on street maintenance without raising tax rates. That means things like adding duplexes, triplexes, and accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in our single-family neighborhoods. You don't have to like increased density to support it. You only have to hate taxes more. And potholes.

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"Tax hikes feared the most,
Yet streets crumble day by day,
Choices hard to make."
—h/t ChatGPT