Audio By Carbonatix
Some time after lunch is when today’s budget briefing ought to get interesting: Not only will the city council take a dip in Paul Dyer’s Aquatics Facilities Master Plan, but it’ll ride shotgun as Assistant City Manager Forest Turner looks at how much it’ll cost to rescue Dallas’s roads from ruin. (Spoiler: $1.2 billion.) Turns out, we’re 30 years removed from the high point reached in 1981, when 89 percent of our streets were considered satisfactory; now we’re at 83.5 percent citywide, below the 87-percent goal set in ’06. And that current rating’s just an average: As you can see above, some districts dip below the district goal of 80 percent okee-doke. Oh, District 13. Your streets are awful.
The briefing reiterates something City Manager Mary Suhm has said often in recent weeks: The streets are falling further into disrepair for several reasons, chief among them a harsh winter and now an unbearable summer, and the fact City Hall has deferred maintenance during all these back-to-back-to-back budget cuts. (The city also blames “development of a more precise
rating system,” whatever.) Which puts us where we are now — needing $1.2 bil in fix-em-ups.
And the city acknowledges that beleaguered Lemmon Avenue between the Dallas North Tollway and Inwood is in need of repair but insists it’s of “marginally acceptable ride quality.” Unlike, say, Henderson between Belmont and Fuqua, where there are “pavements that have extensive amounts of distress
and require partial or full reconstruction.”
