Oakland has fallen behind schedule repaving dangerous roads. According to the city, Oakland doesn’t have enough staff whose job it is to set up contracts with private companies that do most of the paving work. Equipment has also broken down, adding to delays.
Oakland Department of Transportation staff told the City Council earlier this month that OakDOT was able to pave 10.4 miles of roads over the last six months of 2023. This fell short of the 16.8 miles that have been designed to be paved. The city said it was on pace to pave only 35 miles of the 55 miles the city aimed to complete between Summer 2023 and Summer 2024.
OakDOT Director Fred Kelley told the council that OakDOT “will not meet” its goals for the 2023-2024 fiscal year, which ends in June. Oakland has not met its paving goals since mid-2022.
In 2021, the Oakland City Council passed a $300 million five-year plan to fix about 400 miles of roads between 2022 and 2027. Only 36 miles from that plan have been paved. The city is behind schedule because of a “slowdown in contract processing as well as some equipment challenges impacting in-house crews,” according to OakDOT.
OakDOT told The Oaklandside that the “city is still clearing the backlog of contracts that developed in 2022 which impacted all DOT capital delivery programs.” The city also said that this affected their designers’ ability to prepare new engineering plans, further backing up paving.
Over the last six months, most paving in Oakland has been focused on High Street, where the city also added new islands for safer pedestrian crossings and new speed bumps to slow vehicles down. Neighbors told The Oaklandside they are excited about car-slowing infrastructure on one of the city’s most dangerous arterial roads, which had seen 225 collisions from 2014 to 2019.
However, the 4.8 miles of new pavement complete on High Street and other areas of Fruitvale has hardly put a dent in the neighborhood’s overall paving needs. It’s only 12% of its road fix needs through 2027. Most other neighborhoods are further behind.
Paving roads is one of the city’s main solutions to prevent road collisions that lead to serious injuries and deaths, especially because it can be paired with new road designs. Paving also helps the city reduce its exposure to personal injury lawsuits. An Oaklandside investigation last month found the city paid out $35 million to crash survivors over the last ten years.
Bottlenecks in the contracting process
Most of OakDOT’s paving work is done by contractors, which means that quickly processing construction work orders is a critical part of the system to put down fresh new concrete and asphalt.
But for the first 18 months of the city’s five-year paving plan, OakDOT and Public Works lacked the staff needed to make sure these contracts were finalized. At one point in 2021, the city didn’t have any full-time staff whose job it was to process paving contracts. That forced engineers, planners, and transportation managers to do the work themselves, which slowed down other important city projects, including designing new roads.
“Consultant work order processes that used to take 1-2 months are now taking 5-7 months due to a backlog of contract services requests,” Kelley said in a report to the City Council.
OakDOT’s paving design team, which comes up with the plans contractors follow, also had a 33% vacancy rate for months, “with multiple assistant engineer positions unfilled,” the department said in a report.
The transportation department told the City Council this past November that the city’s strict requirements for hiring local contractors also played a part in slowing down paving and other infrastructure fixes. Early in 2022, before the new paving plan began, the council rejected OakDOT’s recommendation to expand the pool of contractors or waive these requirements, forcing the department to negotiate with the smaller pool of companies that could do the work. However, because the contract services division was understaffed, it took more than 14 months for contracts to be awarded and another six months for three out of the five chosen contractors to get started.
Kelley told the City Council this month that three new full-time staff members have been onboarded recently to process contracts for OakDOT and Public Works projects.
In its recent report to the City Council, OakDOT also revealed that the city’s small in-house paving crew—an internal unit that can do the same kinds of work contractors are hired for— has not been able to cut into the city’s large paving backlog. Out of the 36 miles paved in the current five-year plan, 5.4 miles were paved by city crews,11.9 miles by contractors, and 17.9 by utilities like EBMUD.
Oakland has also had equipment problems, and the weather hasn’t been optimal
City transportation staff also said in reports this month that access to materials and paving machines has added to delays.
Until recently, the city owned a single mill, a machine that breaks up old road concrete and recycles it into new paving. Milling can be useful for environmental purposes, lowers paving costs, and helps construction workers finish jobs faster. But the city’s mill broke down in August. The mill also broke down for a month in November 2022. Kelley said earlier this month that OakDOT wasn’t able to find someone to fix the mill until last month, and it’s still not operational.
The city purchased a second mill in December 2023.
“The new milling machine is operational, and staff are being trained on the new machine. No in-house work has started yet this calendar year due to inclement weather. Typically, in-house operations complete an average of 0.75 miles per month,” an OakDOT spokesperson told The Oaklandside.
Paving work has also been slowed down, OakDOT said, because tearing up and repaving a road triggers safety and accessibility improvements, like adding curb ramps at street corners so pedestrians can more easily cross streets. Oakland uses eight paving contractors, all of whom use the same subcontractor to build concrete curb ramps. This has slowed work considerably. A November OakDOT paving report said the city had added 102 new curb ramps in the last 18 months.
Finally, the city said that longer-than-expected winter storms over the previous year and a half have postponed some paving projects.
Some residents asked us whether the paving process was slowed down by any crime contractors faced on the streets. According to OakDOT “street crime has not affected the contracting process or the design capacity for delivering street projects.”
“We do recognize that frontline workers in every sector, including city staff, private contractors, and local utility crews, have experienced the impacts of street crime,” OakDOT said.
