This Fresno street hasn’t been repaved in 50 years. ‘Where are our tax dollars going?’
Bob Krum stopped calling city officials about the crumbling, pothole-riddled street in front of his east-central Fresno home years ago. Because his pleas kept getting ignored.
“I’ve just sort of thrown up my hands,” Krum said. “They look at you all ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’ll get taken care of.’ But nothing gets done.”
His wife, Donna, no longer goes on walks. She won’t risk another trip and fall on the uneven sidewalks near her house. The last one left her with a bloody head.
Their neighbor, Nacho Pinon, exercises extra caution when driving up and down the street.
“We’ve got to go carefully,” Pinon said with a shrug. “Tires are expensive.”
Fresno has about 1,700 miles of roads, making it difficult to say which is in the poorest condition. But as far as residential streets, the 4800 block of East Cambridge Avenue near Fresno Yosemite International Airport can go pothole for pothole with any of them. In some spots, the asphalt has worn down to its gravel base.
As illustrated in a 2019 staff report by Director of Public Works Scott Mozier, the condition of Fresno’s streets has deteriorated significantly over the last decade. In 2008, bolstered by new construction, the city had an average Pavement Conditions Index score of 72. (Anything between 70-79 is considered “good.”) Then the Great Recession hit.
By March 2019, Fresno’s average PCI score dropped to 58, which falls into the upper range of “at risk.”
How does the citywide average compare to the 4800 block of East Cambridge Avenue? Mozier, following a personal inspection, gave it a PCI score of 15. (Anything below 25 is considered “very poor” or “failed.”)
“The street is in need of complete reconstruction,” Mozier said.
Cambridge Avenue and its spiderweb of cracks and potholes is illustrative of what’s happening in many of Fresno’s older neighborhoods, where road conditions, uprooted sidewalks (or the lack of them) and shabby parks (and too few of them) head the list of resident complaints.
Just ask Tyler Maxwell and Nathan Alonzo, the two youthful City Council candidates for District 4 who each knocked on hundreds of doors, including those on Cambridge Avenue, over the past months.
It also raises a pertinent question as city officials grapple with whether to discard an infill-leaning general plan that’s barely five years old: How can Fresno grow outward when so much of its core has been left to rot?
50 years of deterioration
The 4800 block of Cambridge Avenue and its ranch-style houses typical of that era rose from cotton fields in the late 1960s. (City records can’t pinpoint an exact year, and longtime residents say the homes weren’t all built at once.)
Since that time, the street has pretty much been left as is. It never received any chip-seal surface treatment, a pretty standard preventive maintenance measure used to extend the life of paved roads. Nor has it undergone the more extensive grind-and-overlay process.
The only “improvements” along Cambridge Avenue over the last 50 years have been extensive pothole filling. And everybody knows what happens to many of those fillings as soon as it rains.
“The water goes right under each patch and they pop right off,” Pinon said. “Then the loose patches shoot out from under your car tires.”
The residents of East Cambridge Avenue insist they haven’t been quiet about the deteriorating street. They’ve voiced their concerns during neighborhood meetings at nearby schools and fast food restaurants and placed numerous phone calls to the council member’s office for District 4.
All of which have fallen upon deaf ears — outgoing council member Paul Caprioglio gets name-checked — or resulted in promises never kept.
Chet Pauls, a Cambridge Avenue resident since 1974, recalled a neighborhood gathering at McDonald’s with former council member Larry Westerlund, who represented the area from 2005-12.
“He kept saying, ‘We don’t have the money’ and that’s a bunch of baloney,” Pauls said. “A guy stood up and said, ‘My brother lives on the same street as (then mayor) Alan Autry, and his street has been redone twice in 10 years.’
“There is money. It depends on who hollers the loudest or what you’re worth to them.”
Bob Krum, who has lived there since 1968, wondered why several residential streets located a couple blocks away in a county island are in far better shape than his. He also questioned why all the money he and his neighbors pay the city in property taxes never seems to come back to them.
“Sure seems like it hasn’t gone toward infrastructure,” Krum said. “If it went into the general fund, then where did it go? No street paving has been done, except on the north side of town from what I can tell. Why? Where are our tax dollars going? It’s a valid question, and we deserve an answer.”
‘Small pot of money, lots of needs’
The short answer is that very little of Fresno’s property tax revenues are spent on maintaining roads. Rather, that money gets sucked up by other needs, including police and fire, parks, code enforcement and pensions.
Much of the funding the city receives for road paving, traffic light installations and upgrades as well as repairing curbs, gutters and sidewalks comes from outside sources. The largest is SB 1, the state gas and transportation tax, which is expected to kick in between $9 million and $10 million annually. Others include Measure C, the county transportation tax, and federally funded Community Development Block Grants that can only be spent in low-income areas.
Fresno gets about $20 million to $25 million per year for street paving, traffic signals and concrete repair, which Mayor Lee Brand said isn’t nearly enough to properly maintain older neighborhoods like the 4800 block of East Cambridge.
“I don’t know how it got to that point other than the sheer miles of pavement and sidewalk,” Brand said. “We have a small pot of money and a lot of needs. So you do the best you can and try to be as fair as you can.”
Although there are few, if any, residential streets in Fresno in poorer condition than Cambridge Avenue, it is not particularly high on the list of priorities.
That’s because the city does not generally employ a “worst streets first” approach when it comes to road maintenance and repair. Essentially, spending 18 cents a square foot to slurry seal dozens of roads is more cost effective than spending $4.03 a square foot to replace and repave a couple blocks.
Mozier, the public works director, compared it to owning a large fleet of vehicles and then deciding to skip all the oil changes in order to focus on the one or two that need replacement engines.
“The city could easily spend all its money on just a handful of streets in very poor condition and meanwhile lose hundreds and hundreds of miles of other streets,” Mozier said. “It would be very poor financial management.”
The funding gap
Mozier said there are many streets in Fresno just as old or older than the 4800 block of East Cambridge and in better condition because they were properly maintained.
“But when we get into the neighborhoods of the 1970s and ‘80s, that’s when city revenues began to decline and street maintenance was one of the first things to go,” he added.
Any new home currently built in Fresno requires the owner to pay a special tax for street paving, sidewalk and gutter repair and landscaping. But those Mello-Roos Community Facilities Districts (commonly known as “CFDs”) didn’t exist in Fresno until the 1990s, leaving a gap between what it costs the city to maintain older neighborhoods and the funding necessary to do so.
Which helps explain why East Cambridge Avenue was allowed to crumble.
If there’s any consolation for residents, it’s that an entire neighborhood repaving (all streets within Clinton, Chestnut, Winery and Normal avenues) appears on the city’s list of proposed projects funded by SB 1.
The bad news is not until 2023.
“Oh my God, I’ll be dead by then,” said John Carpenter, who has lived on the street since 1968. “I’m 81 years old now.”
