Item A: GO Bond for Street Preservation

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completed with bond money; and (2) deciding whether to include funding for the City’s share of local street improvement projects in the bond amount. Specific Project List: At the council meeting on June 9, there was significant discussion about a bond measure project list. Councilors were concerned about how best to provide assurance to voters that the bond money would be spent on a very specific list of street repair projects. As requested, staff has prepared a list of projects to include in the bond measure. There are 86 street preservation projects on the list, and the measure would repair more than 150 miles of roads and 7 miles of off-street bike and pedestrian paths. Attachment C includes a list of specific projects that is staff’s best estimate of what could be done with available bond funding over the next 10 years, given what is known today. This list has been adjusted from the initial list presented at the June 9 meeting as a result of in-depth examination of the list from an engineering perspective, as well as field assessment of the streets on the list. One of the major changes is that the amount of proposed local street overlays has been reduced because, after performing site assessments on the local streets, staff found that many of them could be addressed through slurry seal or other alternative treatments. In addition, projects that were already scheduled for 2009 and would be constructed regardless of the bond measure outcome have been removed from the list. To bring the total project list back up to the total bond measure size, additional arterial and collector streets have been included with an emphasis on reconstructions. A map of the high-priority street preservation projects proposed for funding from the bond measure is included in Attachment D. Note that the map does not include the off-street bike and pedestrian paths that will be overlaid or reconstructed with the $350,000 annual allocation. Project Implementation: The council has expressed a desire to provide a high degree of assurance to voters about the projects that will be completed with bond measure funds. This will reduce the risk that Eugene citizens will think that the money could be used in a way that was not intended when they voted for the measure. In order to provide the highest degree of assurance to voters, the council could say that bond proceeds will only be used for projects on the list. If all the projects on the list are complete and there is any remaining unused bonds, that authorization would lapse and those bonds would remain untapped for street preservation projects. Taking this approach, while reducing one risk, increases the risk that the City will not be able to maxi- mize and most effectively use the funds for street preservation projects. Things can happen over the next 10 years that might make it impractical or undesirable to complete one or more of the projects. For instance, the community decides not to rebuild a street destroyed in a natural disaster, or a street is rerouted or decommissioned for some reason, or artifacts of historical significance are found in an area, and so on. For this reason, it is prudent to allow for some flexibility to remove projects from the list. In addition, as mentioned previously, there is an inherent difficulty in projecting exactly how much each of the projects would cost over time. Future inflation factors are unknown, and pavement condition estimated in the pavement management report could vary from the original projections depending on changes in weather, traffic patterns, and so on. Due to these uncertainties, there is a possibility that not all of the projects will be completed, so the bond measure language should not guarantee that all projects will be completed. On the other hand, there is a possibility that circumstances turn out better than fore- cast today and there is money left over that could be used for more street preservation efforts. If all the projects on the bond measure list are complete, it might be desirable to allow a future council to add projects to the list in order to completely spend all available bond proceeds. Z:\CMO\2008 Council Agendas\M080716\S080716A.doc