Mayor, city officials discuss paving projects as the 2024 season begins winding down

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KRDO) -- For the second time this year, city officials gathered in front of a northeast-side school to talk about this year's street paving season.

Mayor Yemi Mobolade was among officials discussing paving outside of Martinez Elementary School, at the intersection of Rangewood Drive and Vickers Drive.

The event was a follow-up to a similar event held at the same in location in April, prior to the start of paving season.

Officials said that they want to highlight the end of paving projects -- something that can get gets overlooked because of the focus in getting those projects started after years of planning to decide which streets have the highest priority.

At the previous event, officials demonstrated a pothole repair job on Vickers in the aftermath of an unusually wet spring and summer of 2023 that produced a large number of potholes.

That section of Vickers has since been repaved.

Speaking at Thursday's event -- as they did during the April event -- was Mobolade and public works operations and maintenance division manager Corey Farkas.

They talked about the process of the 2-C expanded paving program, its positive neighborhood impacts and the timeline of projects.

This marks the ninth year of 2-C, the program voters approved with a sales tax increase in 2015 and renewed in 2020.

In November, the city will ask its voters to extend 2-C for another ten years because, despite the progress to-date, more paving is needed.

"There is no plan B," Mobolade said. "It's always Plan A. Our city really needs this."

Many viewers have asked KRDO13's The Road Warrior what percentage of 2C funding is devoted to paving and how much to pre-paving concrete projects .

"In the early days of 2C, it was roughly 60% paving and 40% concrete, depending on the type of street," he explained. "But with the next round of 2C being 90% in neighborhoods, the percentage of concrete will be higher."