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The Vibe Broken Arrow
Created in Broken Arrow for the citizens of Broken Arrow. The Vibe Broken Arrow is produced by City employees and continues the commitment to transparency and keeping the community informed about what is happening in the city. Join us for our monthly episodes that feature the following segments: The Big Topic, In the News, Rounding Third with City Manager Michael Spurgeon, and BA Good Neighbor.
The Vibe Broken Arrow
Driving BA: The 6 phases of a project life to cycle to improve a major roadway
When construction begins on a major roadway widening project it typically represents about 6 years’ worth of work to get to this point of the project. In fact, for the Houston Street widening project between Garnett Road and Olive Avenue, it actually began back in 2017 when it was first identified as a capital improvement project and placed on the 2018 General Obligation Bond that voters ultimately approved. Director of the City of Broken Arrow Engineering and Construction Department, Charlie Bright, talks about the six phases of a project life cycle.
💵 Securing the funding
📐 Designing the improvements
🌎 Receiving environmental clearances
🛣️ Acquiring right of way
🏙️ Relocating the utility lines
🚧 Construction of the improvements
little broken arrow. This is the Vibha. And we are driving by today, albeit from the studio here at City Hall with engineering construction director Charlie Bright. Typically, we have you out in the car and you're driving around. You're telling folks about the different improvements, but you had a fantastic idea to actually sit down and talk about the project lifecycle. Why was this important to you? I think it's important because we get a lot of, you know, we just get a lot of calls. General comments from the community is like, hey, when are we going to fix this? When I'm going to do this? And a lot of those things are in the process. I would say the roads that we hear the most frequently from the citizens about are all being worked on. And we say that and we tell them, but, you know, you don't see immediate change. And so it's kind of hard to believe that sometimes maybe if you're a citizen. But the reality is these road projects are complicated. And on average, they probably take us 5 to 6 years to complete. And there's a reason for that. It's not just going slow, it's just a process. And so I think it's important people understand what that process looks like and understand what's being worked on. It's like we're getting there and we know it's important and we go as fast as we can, and we're trying to get these roads improved. Because we know it takes time out of our citizens days. You know, it's the impact is significant. Yeah. You talk about current construction projects, you know, being able to actually see work happening and right now we have a pretty significant widening project going on a mile there, Houston Street between Garnet and Olive. But it's taken a long time to get to this point. We started this in, around Labor Day of 2024, but this process actually started about eight years earlier. Started with that. As far as just the the the discussion and talk about which of the road improvement projects are going to be included in the 2018 general obligation bond. So you get the securing of the project funding designing of the improvements. Environmental clearance. Right of way acquisitions, utility line relocations, and then finally construction. Let's go back to that first one and securing project funding. This is one of those things that we just can't go to the bank and get the money. Yeah. So, you're absolutely right. We've, I mean, in a practical sense, we probably started that project about eight years ago in a planning stage, you know, and as you said, 20, the vote for the general obligation was in 2018, but we had to do some initial planning to even make it a project in 2017. So really, the idea of this becoming a project happened in 2017. We went to the voters in 2018, said, hey, this is this is the project we want to complete. We need the funding. And luckily, you know, our voters with overwhelming support approve that bond. And, gave us the funding. One misconception, probably by a lot of people, is when they vote to give us the money, we have a check in our hand that day. And that's not the reality. The way our bond, here at the way our bonds here at the city, Broken arrow work. We still collect our bonds on an annual basis based off property taxes. So the voters approve it. And that gives us the opportunity to sell bonds on an annual basis. Then our leadership will decide which which projects and which bonds we sell per year. On average, I would say we sell between 20 and 30 million in bonds a year, but the bond had $200 million worth of improvements. So, basically, we have every project in a line for when they're going to come. And our ultimately, our council makes a decision of when we're going to sell a particular project. So we have to wait for the funding for a project before we can even get started on the design or on the right of way acquisition utilities or anything else. But once that funding comes, then now we're starting the process of that five year window of how long it's going to take us to get to construction. And then when you get into that funding, you have to think of things as far as, the costs on some of the different things and we'll get to them. But like designing improvements. Because to hire an engineering consultant to firm to come out, they're going to want their, their cut. They're going to want to, you know, they need to be paid as well. How much does a design cost? Let's just say well, let's go with Houston. You may not I'm gonna put you on the spot here. You may not know, but you can probably give it an approximate the Houston widening project to Garnet and Olive. About how much did the design cost for that? I don't know the exact numbers. I think the bid price, for that project was approximately $6 million. I think it's 5.7. And, typically a design, from a consultant will run 8 to 10% of your construction cost. So just using rough math there, the design on a project like that, and this was 4 to 5 years ago, the construction has gone up. But design on a project like that probably would run 5 to $600,000 a few years ago. So it's it's not an inexpensive cost to just get the design going on the front end, but it takes a lot of work for them to complete that design. It's a lot of man hours going into just making it operable, and that doesn't account for the right of way for the utility line relocation. And then the overall construction as well too. So design improvements. So whenever are you talking about cost? Is there a big difference between taking a two lane roadway and making it three, four and five lane? How does that process work? Yeah. So typically, there's a lot of needs across our community. You know, talk to citizens. Every citizen wants a different road. Every citizen wants, you know, the road in front of their neighborhood fix, their actual neighborhood fix. You know, in an ideal world, every road we have in town will be five lanes. In fact, I think I see Facebook comments saying, why don't you widen every road and five lanes? At the funding was there. We would love to. But the reality is we have a very limited pot of money that we can do improvements with for the citizens. And so we try to prioritize which jobs get that money based off what the actual data shows and what the needs are. We take traffic counts on an annual basis. We get the data. We run that through traffic analysis. We find what our what streets and corridors have our longest delay times. And once we know where the biggest impacts are, we prioritize those projects. Some areas have a decent volume of vehicles, but maybe not super high, but you're on a two lane road with a small intersection and it's causing significant delays. But from a traffic analysis perspective, we know that if we since the volumes are as high as maybe your main arterials, we know if you add a turn lane and you improve the turn lanes at the intersections, those delay times go away. And so, we look at all that. And in those situations, it makes sense that we just widen the right lane to three, widen the road to three lanes versus taking it to 4 or 5 because it can save us millions of dollars. And that allows us to prioritize those millions of dollars to the other needs that we have in the community. So yes, in a perfect world, we'd love to create the five lanes everywhere. In the world that we live in, we try to prioritize our dollars to limit the delays that we have all across town. So how do you. So I'm glad you brought up the traffic counts. And that takes up a lot of time because you're having to look at all this data, historical data, but then you're also having to look ahead to and look at those areas for economic development opportunities, community development with housing additions and that sort of thing. how important are those turning movements? Because one of the things that we've talked about quite a bit is the intersections and keeping that traffic flowing so that it's efficient, it's quick, it's safe for people. But turning movements, from what I understand, that's the real issue. Turning movements are pretty much the issue. It's not one of the issues on this is pretty much the main issue. Ultimately, if you think logically about traffic and driving across town, where do your delays happen and your delays happen at the intersections or your delays happen on a two lane road, four lane road, when you have people waiting to turn left and they can't do it because the traffic volumes are high, very, very rarely. And I can't think of any in our community off the top of my head or your delays due to the capacity of the actual lanes of the road itself. You know, there is a point where a road breaks down if you just have too many vehicles trying to get on one road, typically. And our system, we don't have a lot of low roads breakdown because of capacity. We have the delays because those vehicles ultimately can't get through the intersection up ahead. And so we do take that into account. We look out of the law and we try to prioritize dollars as much as we can to go towards intersections and to go towards turn lanes. Because we know that those dollars make the most significant impact to limit the delays that our citizens have. So then when you. So that kind of hits on the design after that, then we're looking at environmental clearance. And I think it's probably important to ask this question, are you waiting for each one of these phases to be completed before you move on to the next one, or are they working concurrently? Some of them. We have to wait. It's kind of a process, but we do. We do as much as we can concurrently. For example, environmental clearance is one. We have to wait until the design is done. We don't do an environmental clearance on every project we do. We have federal funding involved, and I estimate 40 to 50% of our projects. And when we take the federal money, there is, federal they get federal regulations tied to that. And those require one of those regulations as we have to do environmental clearances. But we send that off, to the state of Oklahoma, who ultimately administers the environmental clearance and they won't start that until we have a fully design project. Which makes sense if you're going to check what our environmental impact is, you need to know the limits of what our work is going to be. And so we have to finish that design before we're going to go to that next step in the environmental. And it's kind of a similar situation with utility relocations. You know, ultimately those people don't the utility providers don't want to start relocating or planning their relocations until they know where our road is going to be. Exactly. And so we do have to finish that. I'd say the one thing we do concurrently, as much as we can is right away. Again, we need to know most of the design, but there are some opportunities. We know ultimate right away usually is, and there are some opportunities to go acquire what we believe to be ultimate right away. Maybe before we finish the design and get going in that process. When I come back to the right of way and utility, like relocation, staying with, environmental clearance. We were just talking before we started, this podcast about the Houston project between one lane and County Line Road. There's some challenges there on either side of that roadway that are going to take some time. As far as environmental is concerned. It's going to it's going to lengthen the amount of time before we get that clearance. You want to talk about that. And just some of those challenges. The challenges that are there. Absolutely. So that's that's a great example of a project that is complicated. And it's going to take time. To the voters, approve that project is one project actually from one lane to highway 51. We have decided since then to split it into two projects, one from Lynn Lane. Houston Street, from Lynn Lane to County Line, and a second one, Houston Street from County Line to Highway 51. Our reasoning for doing that is exactly what you just talked about. The challenges that happen between Lynn Lane and County Line. It's going to have some delays. It's going to take us some time to get there. But those same challenges don't exist from county line to highway 51. So we decided to split the project. We're moving as quick as we can on the county line to highway 51 portion, and ultimately we're going to go to construction on that portion before we do on the rest. To the challenges that happen on the Lynn Lane to county line section. If you're familiar with the area, you drive the area, you know that it's a two lane road. It's not in great shape. When you're driving out there, it's kind of narrow. You get trees on both sides, but then as you get closer to the eastern end, you actually get to where you have a channel, a stream on both sides of the road. And our world we call the the that streams actually what we call a blue line stream, which means it's on federal maps, the USGS federal maps, and it means it is a federally regulated stream. So we do have a lot of challenges, to design around that. We're not if we impact those streams, we're going to have to work with the Army Corps of Engineers to get permissions to do whatever we're doing inside that regulated area. And it's going to be very challenging to build a road without getting into those streams. If you just drive, you see how close they are to the roadway. And then, as you stated, once we get through the design we're at to then go into that environmental clearance portion with the state of Oklahoma and federal, and, they're going to look very heavily in the environmental clearance at our impact again, on the streams. So we expect a lot of delays. First, dealing with permitting at the Army Corps of Engineers and then more when we go through our environmental phases following that up. But that's also why we felt it was important to split this project up, because we don't need to delay the other half of the project. You know, we're going to go as quick as we can through that process, but those things just take time. I'm glad you pointed that out, because I think that's one of those things I didn't understand until I started working in municipal governance, is that the city has to put in a permit for these sorts of things, too. And so we have to ask the Army Corps of Engineers if we have permission to do these sorts of things. So it's it's not us taking our time. It's it's you have inter-governmental agencies that are having to work together. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'll, I'll say the city and my team, we actually make every effort we, can to follow all permitting requirements, even our local ones that are ourselves. If we put it on a private developer, we try to follow it ourselves. There's some gray area there where we don't pay our own permitting fees because it's just us paying ourselves. But, we follow all the same rules. But then, especially once you get beyond our ordinances and you move on to state law, federal law, we have to follow everything that every other private business wants to follow. We have to go through those permitting processes, and we have to wait our turn in line with those, those, entities. And so, there's challenges and, you know, like anybody knows federal laws. It's difficult sometimes. And there's a lot of strings attached when it comes federal law. And so it takes time for us to get through that. And when you talk about those federal dollars and then coming into the state, Odot must administer those when it comes to these roadway improvements. How does that impact the bidding process and the management process of the project when it finally does get to construction? Yeah, I do. Due to all the regulations that are tied to federal dollars. It makes a significant impact to the schedule and sometimes the cost of a project. You know, you have what you call davis-bacon wages, you know, by American and, and then you have the environmental studies that are all tied to federal dollars. And as you mentioned, Odot is the administrator of the Oklahoma Department of Transportation, is the administrator of those federal dollars. So if we if we were to build a project without federal dollars, there's a lot less regulation tied to it, and there's a lot more control we have of that schedule. So we can typically get a project out a little bit faster. And then we have direct oversight of the project, a little bit cheaper when Odot takes over control of a project. They have their own processes and standards, and they're dealing with communities all across the state, not just ours. So they have a letting schedule, what they call a bid letting schedule, and they have their own processes. So when we finish a project, we'll turn it over to Odot at the state of Oklahoma, have them bid it, and, they'll, they'll get on it. But then they also hire third party. Inspectors versus it being city inspectors. And so it's just a much longer process because now instead of just following our standards, you're following our standards. You're following the state of Oklahoma standards. And then you're trying to follow federal and federal regulations. And overall, it just takes time. And so while some of this is going on, your team is also working on right of way acquisitions. What exactly is that? Yeah. Right away acquisitions is probably one of the hardest challenges of widening a road. So if you go back in history of the state of Oklahoma, you look at every arterial road that we have, which is arterial means the square grid 50 versus 65 or 70 first, all of Aspen, Elm, one lane. You look at those arterial roads. The state of Oklahoma made an agreement with the tribes many, many years ago to give us what we call statutory right away. So every one of those arterial roads has statutory right away. I believe statutory for us is approximately 24.25ft on both sides of the centerline of the road, which means, you take the center of the road, you go 24.25ft in the direction. That's how much land is technically the city of Broken Narrows. Now, the average lane of a road is 12ft. If I'm going to go to four lanes or five lanes, by the time I get that fourth or fifth lane, I'm outside that 24ft. That's mine. Easily. Yeah. And so we have what we call ultimate right away, which is typically 50 to 60ft a lot, most a lot of times it's 50ft, from the center line of the road. And so when we widen the road from that two lanes up to five lanes, we got to go get ultimate right away, which means we need the other 25.75ft beyond what we have. Well, that's private property. Somebody owns that. You know, so we have to go and engage those property owners, tell them what we're doing. Explain the benefit to the public and ultimately acquire that property from them. We get appraisals. We always offer to pay fair market value. But it's a process. You know, some some property owners are like, hey, I'm excited. We're widening this road and they work very easily with us and we come to a deal, make, and buy the property. Others, you know, are in favor of it. They don't want the road widened or they don't want to give up their property. And so they're going to make the process, harder and longer and try to, negotiate with us much longer or flat out reviews selling us the property. And again, once we finish the design, we move into that right away stage. This can just delay a project. You know, if I have a property owner that digs in their feet and doesn't want to, work with us, sometimes it could take us six months, up to a year to figure out a one property. And that will delay the whole project. As that happens. And when you talk about property, are you talking about a person's entire acreage that they have, or is it just what we need for the improvements? So there are some very rare circumstances where we will purchase an entire property, and usually that has to do with the proximity of the home to, to the roadway, how close it is and all that. And so there are some rare circumstances where we bought entire houses and again, we negotiate, we pay fair market value for that whole property. But I would say greater than 90% of the time we're talking about just that portion that we need at the front of the land, which is typically, about 25ft of property at the front. Most of the times when you're talking arterial roads, it's not residential. It's it's an agricultural area or commercial business or whatever else. And we work to take that land. That's just what we need there at the front. We hear words like, condemnation and eminent domain. Is that the same thing as right away? Those are a tool of right away. We we, we make an attempt to negotiate in paying fair market value to everybody that we talk with. Ultimately, the state government says that we do have the power of what people know is eminent domain, which means if we can show a public benefit, we can take the property, we can force the taking if somebody does not want to work with us. People often say that they're still being they're still being compensated for. There is still a process and compensated, So a lot of times there is a, misconception that, you know, a lot of people don't want to negotiate with us or work with us, and that we use eminent domain a lot here at the city of Broken Arrow. That's our tool of last resort. I don't have the exact numbers, but I want to say it's between 80 and 90% of property owners. Negotiate with us, and we come to a mutual agreement that they're going to all sell us the property. You know, we always start with an appraisal on what we consider fair market value. And, we encourage the property owner to go get their own appraisals or make counter offers, and we negotiate of what we think is a fair deal to that property owner and fair to the taxpayers of Broken Arrow, because ultimately it is the taxpayers paying for that property. But as you said, eminent domain is one tool, condemnation and domain kind of the same thing. Condemnation is ultimately the process of us implementing eminent domain. So when we are unable to make a deal with a property owner and we can show that the infrastructure is a benefit to the public as a whole, then we will go through the condemnation process. For road widening if needed, you know, ultimately. But as you mentioned, through that process, they still get compensated, that fair market value. It just takes it out of our hands and out of the property owner hands, and it puts it in the hands of the courts. We go to a court, a judge will assign three commissioners, which are ultimately individuals that are in the real estate business. They know property. They know property values. Those commissioners will come to a hearing, and they will hear our side of what we need, what the project is for, and everything else they'll hear whatever the property owner has to say about the value of the property. The way this impacts their property or impacts their use of the property. And then ultimately the commissioners will make a ruling on what they feel the fair market value is of that property. And then once that ruling happens, we can pay what the judgment is. And then ultimately that property becomes ours. But again, it's based off of what a third party individual said as the fair market value for that property. And those people have no ties to us or the city of Broken Arrow. They're truly just representing those other third parties that are there to do the best. Again. Utility line relocations. You mentioned this a little bit earlier. These are some of the lines that are underneath the roadway. First of all, why do we need or not underneath the roadway but underneath the ground next to the roadway. Why do these need to be relocated? Yeah. So this goes back to the discussion of statutory right away. So, Historically utilities have come into an area, you know, we go way back in history. They come into an area, they want to build out their infrastructure to provide services to the city, but they want to do it in a cheap manner so they get what they call right away permits from us, which basically is agreement that they can, provide their utilities to our citizens and do that through our right of way. The right. And these could be gas, electric, fiber that's worth it. It's everybody any service you got coming to your house, they're in our right away usually. And as you said that's your AT&T is your Windstream is Cox. It's all data. It's so an electric it's on G. It's now new fiber lines. We got a bunch of new fiber companies coming in, but all the services that are provided, a lot of times they're in our right away. And that was just because, you know, historically, that was a cheaper way for them to build out their system than to go get their own private land. Where it makes it a challenge is when we're widening the road. We talked about statutory right of way being 24ft. Well, if we're taking up 12ft of 24 and that other 12 is full of those utilities, now I want to fill that 12 with pavement. I want to widen my pavement to be 24, 30ft in each direction. I'm completely covering those utilities. We don't cover pavement over utilities because they need maintenance a lot. You know, if I go and put pavement over it, we're going to be shutting down that lane of road all the time while they're digging up our road to fix utilities. So before us, before we widen any road, we work with every utility provider to get their systems out of the way. Ultimately, if it really depends on where it's located based off who pays for it, if their entire system is inside our right away, then basically the law reads, hey, we let you be here as a privilege. And, when the time comes and we need you to move, you're going to move at your costs. So if they're just truly sitting in our right away, they pay to move themselves and they just get out of our way, and then we'll build our road. Sometimes, a utility provider will have their own easement beyond our right away. So we have the 24ft. They might have another 20ft beyond it. Well, now we need to widen the road. We need to move our right of way through their easement and build in those situations. They've already paid for their own dedicated easement. They paid to put their line in there. Now we're relocating them for our benefit, not theirs. And, we end up having to pay to relocate those situations. So how the process shakes out is really unique to every situation where the lines are located, but it's ultimately a process. Every single road, I would say, on average, has at least 5 to 6 utilities on the way. And so I need every one of those utility companies to work with me and start relocating before I can ever get to construction. And now we're at construction. You know, let's say that we've gotten through all of this, this, the five previous phases, and now we're at construction. But yet before we can actually go out and any of the road be turned up, we're statutorily we are obligated to put it out for bid. Is that correct? Talk about that process. Yeah. So title 61 and state statute, basically it's known as the Competitive Bidding Act. It says that, you know, we will be, any government work will be open for fair competition to the public. So we, there's, there's a process. And again, it takes time, like everything else. There's a process that says we will advertise in the newspapers. We will make it known that anybody can come bid this work. There's certain criteria they have to meet. But it's an open bid. And we're required to leave that out for 21 days. I bid it oftentimes we leave it out 28. So we actually it takes a month just to get bids. We follow through with that process. And state law will say once we get bids, we will, award the bids to the lowest responsible bidder. It is sometimes misconceived in the public that we always take the low bid. I will say usually we take the low bid because usually the low bid is responsible. But state law does actually say lowest responsible and no weight is given to low or responsible. So if, say your number two bidder is considerably more responsible and raised the number one, we can go with number two because, you know, we feel like they're more qualified to do the work. But most of the contractors that work in the area are all, good contractors, and we don't have many we would consider non-responsive. So a lot of times we do take that low bid. But once we get through that, then we have to do contract signings and, we have to get bonds, insurance, all that in place. Many of those things can take another month or two. And then we finally set up our kickoff meeting and will set a notice to proceed, which is the first day of construction. So even once everything else is done and we're ready to start construction, there's still probably a process of 3 to 4 months before you ever see the first piece of equipment show up out on a roadway. You know, and sometimes that's not always understood. You know, if the public reach out to us, they'll say, why don't you build my road? And we'll say, hey, we're been in May. And then they reach out in May and say, aren't you build my road? Well we are, we're building it and we're getting there. But there's still a process before you actually see a contractor show up. And then one of the things I've noticed, with the engineering construction team that you all started doing, with more frequency here of late, is public meetings with residents of, areas that could be impacted by these. Why are you doing those? You know, it's really twofold. One, citizens are just curious. Sometimes when you're about to source them, they want to know what's going on. They want to know how it impacts. So wanted to kind of satisfy the curiosity, give people the opportunity to just know what's going on. The two and possibly the more important one to me is I want, I definitely push my team the whole public meetings when we're going to be impactful to a neighborhood or an area, you know, if it's just a general project on an arterial that doesn't really have a major impact on a specific neighborhood or anything else, we may not have one. But if we are going to be inside a neighborhood or blocking access to a neighborhood or anything else, we offer everybody the opportunity to come look at the project, hear about it, and meet our team. Ultimately, we want individuals to know how we're going to impact them during construction. You know, it's a citizens choice whether they show up or not. And they want to talk to us, but we want to give them the opportunity to know what's going on. We try to send letters to their houses to let them know we're doing it. I think we've tried to use the next door app in the in the parcel. Now we're going, we may try to target Facebook a little bit more in the future of how we're holding these meetings, and we're talking about putting up some signage in neighborhoods, to let them know. But the ultimate goal is to give them an opportunity to understand how construction is going to impact their lives while it happens, and to give them an opportunity to ask questions about what's happening. And one of the big benefits of coming is we just give you the business card of the people that are doing the work. You know, if you sometimes we're working in the neighborhood, we are going to impact your driveway or we're going to impact your sidewalk or yard, whatever. And if something doesn't seem right, whatever. And you're like, I need to call the city, who do I call? Well, if you show up to public meeting, we'll give you the business card of the guy to call. You're always welcome to call your leadership, your representative, your elected officials, or whatever else. But we'll give you the business card of the staff member that's going to be there on the job site. You call him, he'll know what's going on and hopefully can fix it in a timely manner. Yeah. Let's go full circle here, because we started out talking about the Houston street widening project there between Garnett and all of, on all of our capital improvement roadway projects. We've got the nice big signs that say, you know, progress is promised, but there's always a date on like on that Houston one says 2018, but this started in 2024. You want elaborate just on that date and what that means. Yeah, that's our way of trying to remind the citizens of the funding and reminding the citizens of, you know, how how we get these projects done. And when they voted on it, you know, ultimately, at the end of the day, 2018, 2018, when the citizens voted that they wanted this project done. And everything we talked about today is the process and the life cycle it takes us to get to the end. But the citizens told us in 2018 they wanted to get it done. And now we're saying on the back end, we've done what we told you we would do. And this is us here, sitting here, completing it. We, we know here all the time, you know, I wish it didn't take that long. And I'll say we wish we did. We wish it didn't. The same. But that's it's the process that it is. And once we know, once we get it past the citizens to say, yes, we want this, and the funding is provided to do it, we're going to get to it as quick as we can. And there's a lot of work that's going on behind the scenes to get to those orange cones. And that construction there is. And, you know, that's a great point that you point out is, you know, the work going on behind the scenes. We get Facebook comments all the time. We just hear from citizens, hey, when are you going to do these things? I think it's important to talk about what's happening behind the scenes. Recently your team put out the survey asking about what roads citizens wanted improved. And I think you and I talked about it, probably the top ten roads that came off of that -1 or 2 are already in that process that we've talked to. That's right. And so it's important for citizens to understand that. And we that's why we're talking today and that's why we're trying to get that out to them is, you know, the roads that we heard on that survey were Aspen Street going out towards Indian Springs. We heard Lynn Lane at Washington and the back up at the intersection. We heard which other ones were the main ones, like there were some in Houston, Houston Street coming in past all of to Aspen. I think even Houston, as you go out to at least one. And the important thing is every single one of those is in the design process. Most of them are in the right of way process or utility relocation process, like, we're moving up, getting closer to construction. But those primary roads that the citizens are saying they want done everything else. It's in that process. It's getting done. Many of them voted on in 2018, part of that bond. So we're getting there as fast as we can. Yeah. I noticed you scribbled some notes down there earlier. And is are these the roadways that are currently being worked on behind the scenes? Yeah. So, we had talked about a couple of things. One is just what we've completed recently. It's not always you kind of forget about the ones we've done, but I think since 2018, construction wise, we've completed approximately 11 miles of construction widening. And since that time period and more. So what we were just talking about, there's about 11 or 12 more miles already in the design process to be completed over the next 2 or 3 years. They're not projects that are just starting their projects that have been in the process. Part of that 2018 bond that, we're halfway through three quarters of the way through, and we're trying to get closer to construction. But, regardless what happens with future funding, future bonds or anything else, you know, we still got, 11 or 12 main arterial miles coming up and road linings. And I think it's probably important to to point out that we are in the initial stages right now because we're looking ahead to the 2026 general obligation bond, and we have a whole book of proposed ideas for capital improvements that get potentially be put into that, into those propositions. And so we're already starting that phase now for projects that we haven't even identified yet that could be improved for later on. And it's likely they wouldn't be improved for another eight years. Very similar to the way Houston Street between Grant and all of is happening right now. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's important for voters to understand that when they go to the polls to vote, we are completing or getting closer to completing most of the projects that were in that 2018 general obligation bond. But here we are in 2025, and we're talking about in 2026, going back to the voters to ask about the next bond. But in the planning process, again, you know, as we've talked about several times today, these things take time. And so when we're trying to plan what goes in that 2026 bond, we're trying to project out what the cost of these roads will be in 2030, 2031, because that's likely how long it's going to take us to get to construction on those roads when they have if and when the voters, approve that they want these roads constructed and they want to provide the funding to do that. As we've talked about, we'll wait for that funding to come in on, an annual basis from the property taxes. And as we get it, we'll start the design and we'll move into that process. But I think it's important when you go to the polls and you go to vote, you understand that, you know, next year you're not going to see those roads under construction. It's going to take several years to get there. But we will get there. It's been a solid conversation, I appreciate it. It's been a it's been an education, if you will, as far as that project life cycle, a lot of work going on behind the scenes that, you and your team have to do and, I think we're just like everybody else. We're ready for the construction to be over with just the minute it starts. Yeah. And so it's it was great. I appreciate the conversation. And we look forward to seeing you behind the wheel and driving back and letting us know, what's going on with our city streets. So thanks, Charlie. Absolutely. Look forward to
