With that, we're going to move to our general business, item J1, receiving a report on the status of the city's roadway pavement condition, or also known as PCI.

The staff report.

I'm sorry, I'm going to call on our public works director, Nick Nguyen to open the item.

Welcome again, Nick.

Thank you, Mr.

Mayor.

Good evening.

Mr.

Mayor and Council members.

It is our privilege tonight to provide an update on the general health of the city's pavement network.

The City of Novato is responsible for maintaining approximately 320 lane miles of road.

For perspective, just imagine for a moment.

This is equivalent to a one-lane highway stretching from here to past the city of Santa Barbara.

It takes the proverbial village to manage this pavement network, from the actions taken by this exteem council to residents such as members of the Complete Streets and Pathway Oversight Committee, and to the city staff and contractors who help craft capital maintenance solutions.

It also requires a significant amount of funding, technology and regional support.

Our funding comes from a limited and constrained source, which is the state gas tax.

This restricted revenue is projected to be relatively flat in the future, if not declining due to new vehicle efficiency mandates.

One of the bright spots in this narrative is the narrat is the technology and regional support we receive from the Transportation Authority, Marin, also known as TAM, and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, also known as MTC, who provide us with additional funding opportunities.

MTC also provides the city with a key management tool, a pavement management program called Street Saver.

Not only does is the use of a pavement management decision support program best practice, it is also mandatory if the city is to access federal funds.

For these reasons, the city has utilized a pavement management program for many years to catalog our road inventory and condition, forecast budgets, and establish our preliminary five-year annual street rehabilitation list.

Our pavement management program is updated every two years.

We last updated the program in 2023, and the consultant who helped with the update is here tonight to present the results of the findings.

From NCE consulting, we have Margot Yap.

We are fortunate to have Marg on our team, as she is a legend, uh not to overstate in the pavement engineering industry and has been at the forefront of pavement management for over 20 years.

At the conclusion of our consultant's presentation, our associate engineer Ghoshra Woodfin and I, as well as Margot, our and her team, um will be available for any question.

With that, I would like to turn it over to Margot to present the update.

Welcome.

Good evening, Mayor Mayor and Council members.

So as Nick said I'm here to talk a little bit about the city streets, and I like to think of it as a kind of a state of the streets uh summary for um or for all of you.

So let me just get the clicker.

So the as um Nick mentioned, you know, you've got a pretty substantial street network here.

Um this is about 152 center line miles, a little bit over 327 lane miles, and these are all numbers, but I don't want you to focus on those numbers.

What I want you to focus on is this last item down here on the slide, which is what is the value of the street network that you have.

It conservatively is about 277 million dollars today.

And that's quite a large um chunk for you know a city of the size of Novato.

So the point of my presentation here really is to talk about the value of a publicly owned asset and what we need to do to maintain it and to keep it in good shape.

And so I'm gonna present you with lots of numbers tonight.

Um, hopefully to uh help inform you in any uh policy decisions that you're gonna be making.

So to do a quick comparison in benchmark um Novato with some of the other cities in Marin, you can see that in general, um, you know, we have about 2.9 miles per per per person or per capita in in Marin, uh excuse me, in Novado, and it ranges, it's pretty much in the average.

I think sentence almost a little bit higher, but by and large, it's sort of um uh e more or less the same as some of the other cities.

And when let's keep those numbers in mind, and then let's go to something called the PCI.

And this is the pavement condition index.

And very simply, it's a scale from zero to a hundred, with a hundred being best roads and zero being the worst or failed street.

And where Novato fails on average, is it's at 66.

And then this number 66 is good and bad news, right?

The good part of it is if you look at the pie chart on the right hand side, um, about 40% of your roads are in pretty good shape.

That's really good news.

About half are in fair shape.

And the not so good news is you've got about 12% that's poor or failed.

So that's the part that we try to focus on to see what we can do to rehabilitate this.

And many, many council members and the public asks me uh this question is what is a good number to be at?

Is 66 a good number?

And I can tell you I'm a pavement engineer, and I'll use the um analogy of my daughter who is currently in college, and if she were to come home when she was in high school and say, Well, you know, I got a 66 in my math test, I have two responses as a parent.

One, I can say, well, maybe that's not too bad.

I mean, I was never a very good math student, even though I am an engineer.

Um, another parent might say, you know what, you gotta work a little bit harder if you want to get to college.

So that decision is before you today.

What you consider good or not is your decision, it's a policy decision.

What I can tell you, however, are the financial implications of what 66 means uh in terms of the different uh levels and thresholds we want to approach.