Crest View Drive Residents Ask Council to Reconsider and Repave-Now Please
By Andrea A. Firth
Photo provided
Reclassify, reprioritize, and repave our road was the mantra of the forty-plus Crest View Drive residents who attended last Tuesday's Orinda City Council meeting. As a few wielded signs for their cause, Jerry Loeper, a 14-year resident of the city and a former Orinda Planning Commission member, spoke on behalf of the neighborhood requesting the Council to allocate emergency repair funds to fix some of Crest View Drive's most problematic potholes and to reclassify the residential street as a collector street. Designation as a collector street would put Crest View Drive higher on the list of Orinda roads that are repaved annually through the city's pavement management program or possibly make it eligible for repaving and repair through additional Federal Stimulus Package funding should those monies become available.
Crest View Drive, a 1.2 mile long cul de sac (possibly the longest residential cul de sac in Contra Costa County), which has not been repaved in over twenty years (or possibly twice as long as that according to some Crest View residents) provides a classic example of the significant infrastructure problems that face the city. Drivers from the 125 single-family homes located on Crest View Drive and it's four secondary cul de sacs (Crest View Terrace, Hilldale Court, Culver Court, and Crest View Court) dodge potholes and suffer bone-jarring jolts each day as they travel the street to and from their homes according to one resident. "We are not asking for special treatment," added the resident as he addressed the Council. "We understand that you have to apply funds fairly. We just ask you to look at the road, what it does, and the role it plays in our community."
Having recently taken a drive up the steep incline of Crest View Drive, Council Member Amy Worth sympathized with the residents regarding the dismal state of their street surface, but a solution to the Crest View Drive problem was not forthcoming. "The pot of money [that we have to fix our roads] is only so big," stated Mayor Sue Severson. With an annual budget of just over one million dollars for street repavement and an emergency repair fund of $200,000 a year, there is a very limited supply of funding to address a significant amount of need.
City Manager Janet Keeter explained that the reclassification of Crest View Drive from a residential street to a collector had recently been reviewed by the Citizens' Infrastructure Oversight Commission-a group of residents appointed by the Council to evaluate the allocation of infrastructure funds and advise on prioritization-which determined that the residential road did not meet the criteria to be designated as a collector despite an average daily traffic count of over 1,000 trips per day. There seems little opportunity for Crest View Drive to be repaired in the near future without reclassification, and the cost to repave Crest View Drive from end to end is estimated to be $400,000. The residents remained upbeat and committed to their cause and expressed their past and continued support of bond measures to address Orinda's infrastructure needs. Because the comments from the Crest View residents were part of the public comment session and not a scheduled meeting agenda item, the City Council made no formal response.
Crest View Drive, a 1.2 mile long cul de sac (possibly the longest residential cul de sac in Contra Costa County), which has not been repaved in over twenty years (or possibly twice as long as that according to some Crest View residents) provides a classic example of the significant infrastructure problems that face the city. Drivers from the 125 single-family homes located on Crest View Drive and it's four secondary cul de sacs (Crest View Terrace, Hilldale Court, Culver Court, and Crest View Court) dodge potholes and suffer bone-jarring jolts each day as they travel the street to and from their homes according to one resident. "We are not asking for special treatment," added the resident as he addressed the Council. "We understand that you have to apply funds fairly. We just ask you to look at the road, what it does, and the role it plays in our community."
Lamorinda Weekly, Moraga CA