Since the day I announced my candidacy for Arvada City Council at-large I have indicated that Arvada must make road repair a priority. We need to implement a road repair program without a sales tax increase. One of the primary lessons we learned while being an elected official on the Apex Park and Recreation board the past eleven years is that our voters strongly feel that we shouldn’t build anything without plans to maintain it. Roads and transportation are without doubt one of Arvada’s core service offerings. We should prioritize our core service offerings before spending resources on non-core services. In 2015/2016 Arvada gathered data on the state of its roads. The figure below is a summary of Arvada’s road conditions based on lane miles and road condition classification.And here is a map showing the road conditions in map view.   If your know Arvada streets well in map view you should be able to find your road on this maps to see its condition classification.

So we can see that the single largest category of Arvada’s roads are in the “poor” condition.   And there is an additional 255.7 lane miles of roads in the fair condition.   So why act now ?  The answer here is easy.   If we let the road conditions continue to degrade further the cost of the repair increase dramatically as you see in the figure below.And why no sales tax ?  Please see the chart below and the sales tax rates for Arvada compared to other metro Denver cities and especially our immediate neighbors.  As we all continue to see the necessities of day to day life increase a sales tax increase has a regressive affect those in our community that are in financial stress.   Additionally as our businesses continue to compete more and more not only with the cities below we also compete nationally as more shopping transactions are online (i.e. the Amazon model).  So we must prioritize our budget to maintain the roads we have built with the existing sales tax structure.

And finally in the figure below we can see that the citizen input that was collected also indicates that this is a priority amongst our community. It is certainly the most popular feedback I hear as knock on doors during while campaigning.