SANTA CRUZ >> With election season all wrapped up, Santa Cruz County leaders are trying to make good on a simple and enduring constituent demand: fix the darn roads.

At its meeting Tuesday, the county Board of Supervisors allocated $6.4 million to resurface more than 11.6 miles of unincorporated roadways as part of its 2025 Pavement Management Project. It may be a simple municipal service to provide, but it has become an increasingly complicated and costly one. The county is responsible for maintaining 586 miles of local roadways and many of them are in rough shape, with conditions made worse by the steady stream of atmospheric river storms that have battered the county in recent years.

“For most of us, rural roads (and) potholes are the brunt of the calls and emails that we get,” said Board Chair Felipe Hernandez, who represents much of South County.

Funding sources for this year’s effort include $5 million from Measure D, the 30-year transportation project sales tax passed by voters in 2016, $1 million from the state’s Regional Surface Transportation Program Exchange, $70,000 from the county Parks Department and $270,000 from its sanitation district.

This year’s program targets projects in four of five county districts in areas that include Live Oak, Seacliff, Swanton and Aromas.

No projects in the 5th District were included in this round of plans because its share of Measure D funds were allocated last year by then-Supervisor Bruce McPherson, for emergency repairs at Mountain Charlie Road in the Santa Cruz Mountains. For months, a massive landslide near the border of Santa Cruz and Santa Clara counties had been threatening to cut off hundreds of residents in the area from vital roadway and emergency access. Eventually, conditions stabilized enough for crews to reestablish a safe passageway.

In the 1st District, most projects were concentrated within the Live Oak area and a portion of the Soquel Avenue frontage road near the Pure Water Soquel project. A pipeline was established beneath the roadway for the water project and the county was responsible for repaving half of the impacted area. Other roads slated for work in the district include Paul Minnie Avenue, Rodriguez Street, Main and East Walnut streets in Soquel and the Moran Lake Beach parking lot.

“We should really be spending three times as much if we wanted to actually maintain the pavement condition index in our county (to the level) that we’d like to,” said 1st District Supervisor Manu Koenig. “That said, we can take the moment to celebrate.”

Casey Carlson, a civil engineer with county Community Development and Infrastructure, said the county is seeking reimbursements for the Mountain Charlie work from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. If those efforts prove successful, he said, that money can help replenish planned repairs in the 5th District that have been put on hold.

“As a candidate and now as a new supervisor, local road resurfacing has been a huge issue; there’s a lot of deferred maintenance,” said 5th District Supervisor Monica Martinez, adding that she supported her predecessor’s decision to allocate money at Mountain Charlie Road. “In the next fiscal year, I anticipate that our annual Measure D allocation will resume and that we’ll be able to spread the pavement management program more broadly across the 5th District.”

Similar to Martinez, road repairs were a key component of newly elected Supervisor Kim De Serpa’s successful 2nd District bid last year. All of this year’s Measure D funds in the 2nd District will go to repaving efforts in the west Seacliff region. De Serpa said her predecessor, Zach Friend, made that allocation through a budgetary amendment last year.

While she supports that move, De Serpa said much of her focus moving forward will be on critical rural arterials that are in bad shape, such as Eureka Canyon and Trout Gulch roads.

“The No. 1 problem that all of us in the rural areas face are roads that fail every year because they’re not properly maintained,” said De Serpa.

The repaving plans come less than a year after the county’s Civil Grand Jury released a scathing 22-page report that was critical of the county’s poor road conditions and the strategies used to maintain the nearly 600-mile network. The county maintained it was doing the best it could with limited resources and a challenging string of atmospheric conditions.

The 4th District in South County had two projects included in the 2025 repaving budget along Rogge Lane and Murphy Crossing Road. The primary project in the 3rd District, including much of the North County coastline, will focus on asphalt repair and striping efforts to 4.5 miles of Swanton Road. District leaders have been reserving Measure D revenues since 2019 to fund the project, according to county staff.

Steve Wiesner, the county’s chief roads official, said the next opportunity for the county to plan for road repairs will come in the fall through the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission’s consolidated grant program application. The commission is the local agency responsible for allocating state and federal grant money to the county’s five jurisdictions that provide municipal services, typically on a biennial basis.

As the jurisdiction representing about half the population, Wiesner said it’s the county’s goal to secure at least 50% of that funding.

“It’s a highly competitive program,” said Wiesner. “We have the worst (pavement condition index) out of any of the local jurisdictions and we have the most road miles and lane miles and the most challenging terrain to maintain as well.”

The repaving work, according to a county spokesperson, could begin as early as May 1, but it will all be contract and weather dependent.

“Knock on wood that this next atmospheric river doesn’t take out more roads,” said 3rd District Supervisor Justin Cummings. “It’s about to hit us on Thursday and it looks like it’s going to be a big storm.”