Streets — or more precisely their overall condition, ability to move traffic, and safety — are a hot button issue for Manteca residents.

It even eclipses public safety in terms of the need for stepped up city investment based on a municipal survey plus social media and face-to-face feedback Manteca officials receive.

Roads are one of the main reasons Manteca leaders are asking voters to approve a 20-year, three-quarters of a cent sales tax on the Nov. 5 ballot.

A good portion of the $13 million annually the tax is projected to generate will toward upping the amount of street work the city can perform in a given year.

Manteca is currently doing a flurry of road work addressing pavement issues that include:

*Louise Avenue between Main Street and the roundabout east of the Highway 99 overcrossing.

*Lathrop Road from Union Road to Highway 99.

*The neighborhoods south of Yosemite Avenue, west of Spreckels Avenue, north of Moffat Boulevard, and east of Main Street.

That is in addition to work completed last month on a section of Yosemite Avenue in downtown and a stretch of Spreckels Avenue.

Developers are also widening Airport Way south of Louise Avenue.

They have also completed road work allowing the reopening of the McKinley Avenue and Woodward Avenue roundabout.

It is against that backdrop the city is staging a live Facebook town hall regarding streets on Thursday, Sept. 26, via the City of Manteca page.

It will feature Public Works Director Carl Brown and City Engineer Kevin Jorgensen.

They will explain the issues, the basic nuts and bolts of pavement work and road conditions, how street work is funded, and the street challenges the city is facing.

At the end, the two will answer questions.

The town hall will also be posted on Facebook after it is completed for future reference.

A 2023 pavement index survey of city streets identified more than $50 million of work that needs to be done over 10 years to address street deterioration and other issues.

The engineering firm conducting the survey noted that the need for more significant work will continue to grow if identified work isn’t done. As such, the cost of the needed work will skyrocket.

Currently, the city is only able to roughly spend $2.5 million work on street maintenance a year.

Based on gas tax and Measure K — the countywide half cent road and transit tax — the city is getting less than 50 percent of the $5 million a year that is needed annually over the next 10 years to do what work has been identified in the plan.

The city can go after pots of state and Measure K funds as they have in the past to fund needed work. But the money they are seeking is also being sought by  every other city in the state and county depending upon the funding source.

Demand — even with increased gas taxes— exceeds the identified needs throughout the state.

It should be noted the city’s street maintenance needs is a moving target.

That’s because streets that were in good to excellent shape based on the pavement condition survey and not in need to of some type of attention to prevent pavement from getting worse will age.

That means even in  the 10-year horizon the street maintenance plan covers they could be a need to perform work due to unanticipated wear and tear such as from shifting traffic patterns.

And even in the best case scenario if the city knocks down all $50 million of identified work over the next 10 years, other streets will be in need of work a decade from now.
The  city now has 264.70 center lane miles of work. If stretched end-to-end that represents pavement that would extend from Manteca along Highway 99 to a point 17 miles south of the Tehachapi Pass after merging with Interstate 5.

Seventy-two percent of the city’s streets — or 190.4 miles — are classified as residential or local streets. There are 86.8 miles of collector streets and 83.6 miles of arterial streets.

To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com