In case you don’t have time to pick through the new Audit of the County’s Road Resurfacing, Improvement, and Maintenance Practices from the Maui County Auditor (it’s football season, after all, and that new Star Wars trailer finally dropped!), here are a few snippets that won’t take you any time at all to read:
• Based on the Department’s current practice, it is estimated to take approximately 65 years to reconstruct or rehabilitate all 1,160 lane miles of County roads–beyond the scope of the Department’s existing 6-year midrange plan. [Page VIII]
• Each District patches its own potholes. Our audit found there is no consistency in the way each District records repairs. Therefore, the data is not in a format that would allow the Highways Division to analyze or determine the effectiveness of pothole repair methodologies, the frequency of repairs to the same pothole or street, staff productivity, or the best repair option. [Page IX]
• During the course of the audit a meeting was held between the Engineering Divisions of the Department of Public Works and Department of Water Supply. The meeting discussed upcoming road reconstruction, rehabilitation, and resurfacing projects. The meeting appears to be the first of its kind in recent history. [Page X]
• The Highways Division purportedly prepared a 5- to 10-year plan. However, the electronic document was lost when an employee’s computer hard drive failed. During the course of this audit, the plan’s existence could not be verified. [Page 8]
• To put this in perspective, if the County’s infrastructure needs are to reconstruct and rehabilitate all County roads, it is estimated to cost approximately $1.6 billion to reconstruct or rehabilitate all County roads. [Page 10]
• Due to the many sources of input for reporting potholes and the lack of a formalized, established procedure to centralize and compile all reported potholes, we could not substantiate that all potholes are identified and repaired. [Page 15]
• It appears the increasing trend of Highway Fund cash appropriations to the Maui Bus has come at the expense of Highway Fund cash appropriations for road-related activities of the Department of Public Works. Further, this reduction in Highway Fund cash available to the Department of Public Works appears to have resulted in increased dependence on the issuance of Highway Fund debt to pay for road improvements. [Page 23]
There is good news, though: as bad as that list of problems is, county Public Works Director David Goode wrote in his response to the auditor’s report that “We generally agree with the findings and will look to implement most of the findings as time and funding becomes available.”
If you insist on reading the report for yourself, click here.
Photo of road in WWI France: UBC Library Digitization Centre/Wikimedia Commons
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