Problems prevent median landscaping

[EDHFan]

Obstacles persist in preventing the landscaping of an El Dorado Hills traffic artery's center strip.

It's possible that the cityhood proposed in 2005 might have sliced through a tangle of plans and policies proper to El Dorado County Department of Transportation and El Dorado Hills Community Services District around the Salmon Falls Road-El Dorado Hills Boulevard roadway.

As things stand, one kind of obstacle plagues Salmon Falls' landscaping prospects, and another gets in the way of a spruce-up for the boulevard section of the north-south artery.

In the days when the county DOT built Salmon Falls Road, it went with asphalt curbing along the center strip, because that was standard policy. Now, that choice of curb material means no landscaping any time soon, said Russ Nygaard, DOT deputy director.

The reason is that landscaping needs irrigation, and with near-constant exposure to water, curbing made of asphalt can rot, unlike more tightly composed concrete curbing.

"Asphalt curbing is definitely a large savings over concrete," Nygaard said. "Our new standard, just in the last couple of years, is to (sink) concrete curbing below the level of the roadway. Behind that, you put in a drainage blanket, which collects water in perforated pipe and carries it to a storm sewer."

Nygaard said that Serrano and Silva Valley parkways were built, at developer expense, to accommodate landscaping on center strips. Perhaps a city government would have been able to replace asphalt with concrete curbing on Salmon Falls, and landscape.

"Citrus Heights and Rancho Cordova have been making improvements on landscaping center strips," said El Dorado Hills resident Norm Rowett. "I believe some comes from federal money you're able to get if you're a city."

As for south of Green Valley Road, the problem is timing, said Ken Malonson, CSD associate planner.

"The portion of El Dorado Hills Boulevard that is north of Governor's Street and St. Andrews is not landscaped because of the long-awaited EDH Boulevard Realignment Project," Malonson said. "This project has been in the planning phase for many years and is still not expected to commence until 2012 at the earliest. It would not be good use of public funds to landscape this portion, just to have it demolished during the reconstruction of the boulevard."

Nygaard said the county must wait for its Transportation Impact Mitigation fee account from developers to swell enough to do the realignment, which would route EDH Boulevard along and near the roadway of current Francisco Drive.\~

[Alliance]

Median curbing issues couple into the broader major issue of road maintenance.

The dominant question is funding, with road maintenance funding from the County continuing to be dramatically inadequate. Funding has limited County DOT's average pace for pavement overlays to about 10 miles per year for the last 5 years. At that pace it would take about 120 years to overlay all county-maintained roads once.

Incorporation as a city would have produced substantial fiscal benefits for both the City of El Dorado Hills and for the County.

The Comprehensive Fiscal Analysis for the 2005 incorporation attempt showed that the County would receive $751,262 per year in Road Fund revenue neutrality payments from the city. This represents the difference between $1,421,993 in road fund revenue previously generated in El Dorado Hills and $670,731 actually spent in EDH by the county from the County Road Fund. California's revenue neutrality laws assure that EDH as a city would continue to be as much of a funding source for the rest of the county as it had been as an unincorporated community.

At the same time, incorporation would very substantially increase revenue to the city's road fund. This is because state law allocates a percentage of gasoline sales tax to incorporated cities. This is new revenue not available to the County. The net result is that El Dorado Hills was forecast to have net Road Fund revenues of about $2.8 million in FY 2008 -- roughly the same amount as the entire County's Road Fund revenues in typical recent years.

Actually, the CFA's estimates were conservative. They did not forecast the very high inflation in retail gasoline prices, recently about 60% higher than they were in 2004, when the data for the CFA was collected. The share of galsoline sales tax going to the city is based on a percentage of retail price, not on a fixed allocation in cents per gallon.

Where the portion of city Road Fund revenue from gas sales taxes had been forecast to be around $1 million per year, inflation would have actually produced about $1.6 million as of the current date.

[jodyann11]

Is there anyway that volunteers may be able to make the median look a little better? I know the irrigation is a problem but maybe there are residents in the landscaping business willing to devote their own time to beautify the neighborhood. Even large cobble rocks would look better than dead weeds.