male announcer: Support for "Headline Humboldt" is made possible in part by viewers like you, thank you.

James Faulk: Coming up next on "Headline Humboldt," we sit down with County Public Works Director, Tom Mattson, to discuss the county's recent decision to put a one cent sales and use tax on the November ballot to pay for road maintenance and public transportation improvements, coming up now on "Headline Humboldt."

♪♪♪♪♪ James: From the top of Humboldt Hill, this is "Headline Humboldt," I'm James Faulk, thanks for joining us.

After decades of state funding diversions and a series of natural disasters, the roads in Humboldt County are in bad shape.

The board of supervisors in April decided to put a one cent sales and use tax before voters in November.

If approved, the tax will help fill funding gaps, fix roads, improve public transit, and keep motorists safe.

I spoke with Public Works Director, Tom Mattson, this past week about why the tax represents the county's best chance to keep Humboldt County's roads in working condition.

We'll hear his best case after this short break.

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♪♪♪♪♪ James: Now, here's my chat with Tom Mattson.

Tom Mattson: The county roads have always been basically in an average kind of condition for counties in California, counties nationwide.

There's a few counties in California that have very good roads, the vast majority are in the fair condition, and then there's some in the poor condition which we have now dropped into.

And so, basically going back to the '90s, the late '90s, mid 2000's, you know, we would get one federally declared disaster maybe every three years and it would run $3 to $5 million and we could absorb that without really any major, major difficulties.

It wasn't easy, but we did it, the roads were continuing to hold in that, you know, fair category.

But in 2017, we got hit with $41 million in damage to the road system followed by $15 more in 2019, and then from 2020 to 2024 with three federally declared flood disasters, one state declared earthquake, and one locally declared disaster last February out in the Ferndale area, we've been hit with another $15 million.

So, basically since 2017, in seven years, we've been hit with $70 million in storm damage, and the problem that has occurred is we have to use our maintenance money to fix those storm damages even when they're approved and wait for reimbursement.

So, we've been using, you know, significant amounts of our maintenance money that we should be using to maintain the roads to fix the storm damage sites to the tune of, you know, now we're somewhere in the $8 million range in the deficit currently, waiting for reimbursements.

And so, that has taken its toll on maintenance.

We've gone from, you know, we rate our roads from basically 0 to 100, it's called the Pavement Condition Index, 100 is a brand new road, zero is a gravel road.

And so, we were floating in the mid 60s, in the mid 60s, in 2017 we started to drop a little bit, and now we're down to 49 which is in the poor condition, and our consultants that do these analysis for us are basically saying if we don't do something different, in ten years your roads are gonna be in extremely poor condition down into the low 20 ratings, which is very bad because it costs a lot more to fix a bad road than it does to keep a good road in good repair.

It's like the roof on your house, when it starts to leak, you need to fix it, otherwise, all of a sudden you have all these ancillary problems, including mold and everything else.

And our roof is collapsing on the county road system.

James: Now, so, I mean, you mentioned that you've had a lot of floods and then the earthquakes as well.

Earthquakes was something that you had prior, but maybe not regularly, and then now climate change, is that to blame for the floods and stuff to your mind?

Tom: We are certainly experiencing a higher frequency of storm events, definitely.

Yes, the earthquakes come when they wanna come, it just happened to fit in there and it is a declared disaster, and earthquakes do cause problems with our roads.

They cause culverts to separate, crack, et cetera.

So, we are seeing, you know, like I said back in the '90s through mid 2015 even, you know, it was maybe one bad storm every three years or two in a year but only for the six years, and now if we look, you know, we've got seven of them in seven years.

That's a pretty rapid increase, even throwing out the earthquake it would still be six, but that's a lot more than one in every three years, and the damage costs are much more significant.

James: Can you talk a little bit about the, you know, when you have a disaster, the county has to pay for immediate relief, and then you get, you know, reciprocated for that expenditure.

How does that process work and how long does it take?

I mean, I imagine the bureaucracy can be quite cumbersome in those situations.

Tom: Yeah, and generally in an emergency we're allowed to reopen the road minimally, and then it takes about three years to go through the federal process to get all the approvals and get the design and everything funded.

And we have to front all that money and then we go out to construction, we have to front that money, and then when we start filing claims, it could take six to ten years to get reimbursement.

So, I've still got damage from 2017 we have not been reimbursed for as of yet, and that hurts on the cash-flow-moving-forward basis.

Again, that's money that we should be spending on maintenance.

You know, when we get these disasters, we don't get any funding to enhance the road at those locations, we get money to put it back the way it was.

So, we have, you know, repeat locations year, after year, after year, because we don't have the extra funding to harden the sites with better retaining walls, rock slope protection, things that we wanna put in or extend the project limits.

None of those are allowed by the federal rules.

James: So, now what would you say the dollar amount is for deferred road maintenance?

I mean, the number is always kind of ballooning, but did you guys have any kind of estimate?

Tom: Well, every time we'd have the consultants analyze our roads, they do it, they come up every four years, they analyze not only the roads for the county but also for all the cities, and this year the tribes.

We had them give us a ten-year projection, what would it take to get back to what we call the PCI of 70?

Because that puts us into good shape, which is the cheapest to maintain.

When we first did this back in 2012, it was $150 million over ten years.

In 2017, they told me $300 million over ten years.

The last report in 2022 was $500 million over ten years, so it is getting worse.

James: Now, since you're a long timer with the Public Works Department, you've seen the state finances do what it does, and I know that the situation was a little bit different before maybe the '90s and then things like, ERAF came along and took, I mean, prop 13 and those sorts of things, when was the last time that the county was able to raise enough money on its own to fund its own road maintenance, and how has that changed over time and what's to blame?

Tom: Well, county roads, you gotta go back into the '60s for, and it was, you know, a lot of heavy logging.

Right or wrong, they paid a lot of taxes to the county road system through the timber tax.

Ever since the timber has gone down, that revenue has gone away, other revenue has gone away.

We had an increase in state gas tax funding a few years ago.

It was about a third of what we needed, but it's still a lot better than what it was before.

So, just, you know, going in until SB1, we got SB1, our annual maintenance dollars were about $10 million a year, where realistically we needed about $25 million a year if we want to get the roads improved.

With SB1 that was an additional $5 million a year for the county, so we were running at $15 million a year.

But again, that's my baseline amount that has to pay for maintenance, has to pay for storm damage.

Any grants we get generally have up to a 20% match, so we try to leverage, you know, state and federal grants to extend our money, but we're at the point now where we don't have the money for the match.

I've got about $17 million in projects ready to bid that I don't have the local match to bid this year that I'm having to put off for a year.

James: Now, it's been widely reported that the county is experiencing a deficit this year.

How does that affect your department, does it?

I mean, are you insulated by virtue of grant dollars and that sort of thing or does it impact you?

Tom: I get only a small portion, and this goes back to the '70s and Prop 13.

We get a small component of the property tax.

ERAF shifted a lot of the general fund property tax from the county to the state, so it really restricted the general fund.

But my one-point-whatever percent is pretty locked in, and then the rest of my funding pretty much comes through the gas tax, a little bit from permits, a little bit here, a little bit there, secure rural roads.

But the state gas tax is the primarily, and it's been pretty steady.

I mean, it did go down during COVID, we're watching it carefully with the transition to electric vehicles and what the state is gonna do when there is no gas tax, how roads are going to be funded, but you know, I've been pretty steady but I've not seen the increases that I've needed.

But with the state, with the general fund, that really doesn't--it has an effect on us because then we can't ask for the money we need from our local government.

But it doesn't come out of, you know, the state gas tax, that money is fixed for roads and roads only.

James: Now, you mentioned, ERAF, which is the Educational Revenue Augmentation Fund, from--I think it was the '90s.

Yeah, they took some local dollars, discretionary dollars, and gave them to the state with the promise to pay them back, and that sort of never really happened, which is sort of the--you can take for granted that's the typical state/county relationship, but I mean, from your perspective, what is the final fix for this?

What's the best idea that you've heard or proposed, seem proposed that could make counties whole and able to move forward into a future where they are responsibly planning and maintaining their road systems?

Tom: Well, it's readily apparent we're not gonna get a bailout from the state or federal governments.

This has to be ongoing funding, and on July 23 our board did vote to put a one cent sales tax primarily for roads onto the November ballot.

This is something they've been talking about for quite a while, did a lot of surveys of the community, and we're going around and giving information out on why we're doing this, and it's basically what I've just said, the vicious cycle of damage, taking maintenance and driving maintenance down and driving the road conditions down, and we're at the point where, you know, frankly the answer is we have to help ourselves.

James: Yeah, no, I mean, I understand that and I get the argument for the tax and I want to get more into that, but at the same time I'm kind of trying to look at the bigger picture.

There's structurally something wrong where, I mean, it can't be expected that county governments are going to be forced to go to their taxpayers and raise sales taxes each time that they need to kind of make their roads better, right?

I mean, do you have any thoughts on what could be a permanent fix that you would like legislatures to consider?

Tom: Well, we were hoping SB1 would be the fix, but there wasn't the mood in the legislator for the amount it needed to be.

Realistically, for the state of California and for the California counties and cities, that needed to be about $15 billion a year in revenue and it's about $5 billion a year in revenue.

And so, you know, counties and cities as well, since ERAF have been going to the sales tax heavily as their only backfill, and the advantage of that is the fact that it's constitutionally protected as a voter approved funding mechanism.

So, it does offer more protections to the residents that it won't get swept away by the state.

James: Yeah, and there seems to be a lot of accountability built into the move that you guys are gonna make, so let's talk a little bit about the tax.

What is being proposed?

And the board voted on it, so that means it'll be coming up in the November ballot, is that right?

Tom: Correct.

James: What's the amount of the sales and use tax and where can people expect to see it?

Tom: So, the tax is proposed at one cent.

It would generate about $24 million dollar a year for both transit and roads, and then there'd be a committee set up to develop the allocations.

We're hoping the Social Service Technical Advisory Committee for the Humboldt County Association of Governments, which deals a lot with all the transit in the county, can be the board, a Brown Act board, a public meeting board that, you know, makes the transit recommendations.

We're looking to set up a committee for the road recommendations.

We have a program that we plug numbers into that tells us where we should be putting our money down, what types of repairs we should be making, so whatever our allocation would be, we would plug into that program and recommend, you know, the spending be done in a scientific way on those roads.

We would bring that to the board of supervisors, and then after the year is ending, everything would go to, we hope our audit committee, which includes our elected auditor, elected treasurer, a couple of board members, several members of the public, to ensure that we spent the money where the tax ballot said it should be spent.

James: Now, that's a model that Measure Z set up, right, where they had the auditing committee?

Tom: No, it's a little bit different.

You know, Measure Z is very competitive across the county.

We're not looking to set up an extremely competitive review, we wanna, you know, be able to present.

You know, we're not fighting with other agencies, really this money is in the resolution or board adopted.

It would be for roads and transit, and so we want the committees for transparency.

We wanna be able to show the public that, you know, if they vote on this, this is where their money is gonna go.

We wanna be able to, you know, show them that we're doing what they voted for.

The committees are really for the transparency.

James: Absolutely, is there a sunset clause on this or is this something that would be ongoing until otherwise directed by the board?

Tom: We did not propose a sunset clause.

The public at any given time could vote to rescind it.

James: Yeah, I think that's important for people to realize.

Now, you said you have a program that you enter in your information and it kind of tells you what repairs?

Are there high priority areas?

I mean, off the top of your head, what do you think are the areas that need the most maintenance most immediately?

Tom: Well, it's all over the county.

I can't just say one, because we look at it as a 1,200-mile system, not as a district or this or that.

And it, you know, basically we plugged the number in that we have for pavement management, and it, you know, basically goes through and tells us, okay, this road over here needs a chip seal this year.

It rates roads by, you know, their traffic loading, their priority in the county system.

The county, you know, has three different types of roads basically.

Local roads, which are your residential roads, collectors, which take you from your residence to the arterial, which is the main road.

An arterial would be like Central Avenue, Central Avenue in McKinley, that's an arterial.

It serves 18,000 people a day.

The program is gonna tell us to keep that in good shape because it's in relatively decent shape, but we have rural arterials that are critical, especially when the state highway gets shut down.

You know, Alder Point Road connects Highway 101 and Highway 36 through the backwoods.

Mattole Road connects 101 to 211 back to 101, you know, and these roads are important even though they may be low traffic, because you know, that's where our agriculture is.

That's where our timber comes from.

That's where our gravel comes from.

That's where our food comes from.

And you know, just as an example, in the 1964 flood, the only way into the county for 100 days other than the air was Bell Springs Road, which is a county maintained road split halfway basically between Mendocino and Humboldt County, and people had to come in on convoys over that road with supplies.

That's how critical the county road system is.

So, we spend a lot of money in a lot of different places.

Like I said, 1,200 miles of road, it's probably gonna focus, you know, primarily on arterials and collectors until we start getting things back in good shape.

James: So, if this, you know, sales and use tax doesn't pass, what does that situation look like?

Just to give our viewers a sense of how important this is from your department's perspective, but also from, you know, the operability of their vehicles, the damage that people's vehicles suffer on roads that are, you know, poorly maintained because they're rough and they cause all kinds of tire issues or hydraulics, all kinds of stuff.

I mean, there's ramifications both publicly and privately for that, right?

Tom: Currently, I think the estimate is about $900 a year every person with an automobile spends for repairs because of bad roads in the state of California.

That will certainly go up in Humboldt County.

You know, the roads will continue to deteriorate and we will be focusing on keeping our good roads in shape so they don't deteriorate, but some of our other routes are just gonna--they're gonna continue to get worse.

James: Yeah, that's interesting you mentioned the fact that the switch to gas cars, I mean, the funding mechanisms that are currently in place are basically already gonna go extinct based on planning by the state government, and you've seen no movement whatsoever from the state to say how they're going to supplant that?

Tom: Well, they are looking at a vehicle miles traveled kind of fee for electric vehicles.

They haven't gotten there yet.

What they've done is increased registration fees on electric vehicles, so if you have an electric vehicle, you're paying a lot more in registration currently than a gas vehicle.

But you know, what they're looking at is a no-net-change in revenue, so they're, you know, planning on not using it to raise funds but to maintain the funding that they do provide.

James: Yeah, now when I was talking to folks a few months back about county roads and stuff, a lot of them sort of had an impression that the way the road systems are maintained can be political.

That, like, if certain supervisors, you know, want a certain road fixed, that'll move up in the priority list of what the Public Works Department does.

Can you dispel that?

I mean, how are the projects chosen right now?

Are they chosen by you or is there some sort of, you mentioned the program, is that how you guys come to that?

Tom: The program will decide our capital improvements.

We will take that to the board.

If they want changes, they can certainly make changes.

Right now, yes, board members do send over complaints.

We have a dispatch line, we get complaints from the public, you know, we do routine pothole filling, you know, major projects generally go to the board for consideration, they generally come out of, you know, I have bridge reports.

If I'm gonna do a bridge, I've got reports from Caltrans that are telling me which ones to do and I bring those forward.

So, nobody gets to come out and say I want my bridge repaired.

We don't have the money for that.

We go based on the science of what the bridge is, and the roads are in a very similar, you know, nature.

We have them split out by districts which are different than supervisory districts.

They're based on, you know, areas that are maintained by the different areas.

The crews get a set amount of money and it's up, really, to the foreman of the crew down that far who makes the day-to-day decisions on where to spend maintenance money based on their intimate knowledge of the roads that they're responsible for.

They need something more, they come up and they say, "Hey, I need more money for this section of road."

We take a look at it, we see what we can do, but, you know, realistically, we wanna focus on the scientific approach, bring it to the board, if they want changes they can make changes, they are the board of supervisors, and we'll go from there.

But we are fully invested in this program as well as all the cities.

It's a similar thing to what all the cities are currently doing with their sales tax revenue.

They look at this program, and you know, kind of, you know, I'm not gonna jump all over the county on a chip seal when the mobilization costs will kill me.

I'll make some sense of that and, you know, focus on certain areas, but rotate it around.

So, it's complex but we try to keep the politics out of it.

Yes, we hear their complaints, we try to resolve their complaints, but you're not gonna get a gold plated road out of me just because you complain about it because I don't have the money to do that.

James: Well, I have to say, from my own personal experience, I did complain at one point.

I didn't complain, I was more like, hey, there's an issue here, but I popped a tire up on Humboldt Hill Road and you guys came out within a week and, you know, remedied the situation, so I appreciate that.

And you didn't do it because I was a member of the media, that didn't come up, it was just because you guys heard it and then fixed it.

Tom: Yeah, we have an electronic reporting system on our website, so if you hit a pothole or something, you can click on our website, fill it out, tell us where it was, what day it was, and we'll generally be out there.

We pretty much guarantee we'll be out within 30 days, but if they're bad potholes we're generally out there.

Like, in the severe winter storms and stuff, our people are running around all the time, so they may have already called, you know, be on their aware list before anybody calls it in because they're out inspecting the roads and figuring out what to do as soon as the weather clears, what they're gonna have to do to come in and fill potholes.

James: To me, it's reassuring that you have people in charge of individual segments of the road, the place that they sort of patrol and get to know, because then it's not coming from, you know, a Eureka office building about where they do the fixing, it's like the people who are on the ground and seeing what the roads look like, they're the ones who are determining the basic maintenance, and I think that that's important.

The polling that you guys did, how did that look and were there any alarm bells raised, or what was the message that you guys got from the polling?

Tom: Well, the message was loud and clear for support for maintaining county roads.

Bus service also had a lot of support, especially for seniors and people with disabilities, and those are the, you know, the items pushing the top of the list.

A lot of the other things we polled for, they were, you know, they were getting positive support but not nearly what roads and transit were getting.

These are, you know, we're trying to respond to what we asked the public.

If these are certain services you would fund, which ones, you know?

And then we looked at the numbers, and you know, road maintenance was like 70% in one of the poles of support, transit is close to 60% or above 60%.

You get down towards the 50%, you got a plus or minus error of 5%, you don't know if it's 51% or 47%.

James: Yeah, that's interesting with the transit stuff.

Now, you mentioned that AgeCog would probably be determining where the expenditures would go in relation to transit, is that right?

Tom: That's what they do now through their Unmet Transit Needs Study.

There's a multitude of transit agencies in Humboldt County that operate, and they all go through the Social Service, well, for the money allocated by AgeCog, which you know, some of it comes from the county, some from the city's allocation, so that group sits down, they're all transit users, they understand the system, you know, they're like our road people for roads.

They understand transit, they follow it daily, a lot of them use the transit on a regular basis, so we consider them the transit experts and we consider them probably the best people to recommend where any additional transit funding is spent or where more money needs to be invested if funds are pulled back from the state.

James: One thing that I remember hearing a lot of is that the infrastructure bill that came out of Congress was supposed to be, you know, kind of a boon for a lot of public works in the country, but that road doesn't--that money doesn't trickle down to county roads then, does it?

Tom: It does if you have money for matches.

That requires a 20% match, so if I've got a, you know, a million dollar project I've gotta come up with $200,000 and I don't have that ability right now.

I've got projects out there I'm seeking funding for, but we're asking for 100% funding because we don't have the money for the match.

You know, the infrastructure bill actually is really good.

If we had match money, we would be going after it like crazy.

It's been really good for the big urban areas where they do have match money and they can get some mega projects.

James: And so, with this tax's approved, ultimately, you may be able to pursue.

It's like it'll be increasing return, right?

I mean, potentially.

Tom: Yes, we can leverage $4 for every dollar we spend, you know, on an approved grant, and that greatly expands our ability to do work.

You know, most of our big projects in this county are grant-funded.

Our bridge projects, that's a grant program.

Our big road projects are grant programs.

And so, that is a critical third leg.

You know, we have the maintenance, we have the engineering stuff that we do, but being able to leverage those federal grant monies for the bigger projects will go a long way to help this county.

James: That's pretty much all I had for you.

Is there anything that you'd like to stick in there that I didn't ask about?

Tom: The reality is whether you want to vote yes or no, the most important thing you can do is vote.

James: That's it for this evening.

Thanks for watching, and remember to vote.

Stay tuned, stay informed.

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