Tonight Chico City Council will hear a report about how great the gas tax increase is. Public Works $taffer Brendan Ottoboni will give a report on how much money the city will receive and what project this will pay for.
http://chico-ca.granicus.com/MetaViewer.php?view_id=2&event_id=285&meta_id=58717
$1.7 million for a ” Cold-in Place-Recycle ” of .70 miles of Esplanade.
A “cold in place recycle” means they will strip off 2 – 4 inches of existing asphalt, grind it, mix it with one or another “binding additive”, and smear it right back down on the existing base. According to “Pavement Interactive,”
http://www.pavementinteractive.org/cold-in-place-recycling/
this procedure is appropriate for streets with a stable base. Have you driven Chico streets lately? Hear that rumbling under your tires, sometimes it sounds like broken crockery? That’s the base, and it’s not stable. Roads all over Chico need to be scraped down a good two feet, and relaid. But here Ottoboni tells us, it’s just going to be another Band-aid job.
$1.7 million for less than a mile of pavement? Does anybody ever think to ask why so much money? It’s because of the system of “cost allocation,” by which funds that are restricted to one use, like road repairs, are siphoned out to pay for salaries and benefits of people who have nothing to do with fixing the roads. Like city mangler Mark Orme – just for signing Ottoboni’s report, Orme got money out of the road fund.
I think he should get his ass out there with a mop, start moving some tar.
I could think of some good use for tar right now.
Chico Taxpayers Association 
For what’s going to cost to fix the roads you could pave the roads in gold if the corrupt government was doing the fixing.
What bugs me further is roads used to be good employment, creating many jobs. We got good roads and good jobs. Now we get neither.
For what’s going to cost to fix the roads you could pave the roads in gold if the corrupt government wasn’t doing the fixing.
People don’t pay attention, they don’t ask enough questions, and they’re too willing to be led along by bureaucrats like Mark Orme and Brendan Ottoboni.