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A leaking water pipe. An 18 wheeler. Santa Anna's left boot. All of them are reasons a San Antonio street is still bad.
I sat down with Mike Shannon, the City of San Antonio's Director of Capital Delivery, the man whose department is running about 180 construction projects at this moment: streets, drainage, parks, fire stations, police stations. Councilwoman Marina Alderete Gavito is in the room, and between them they answered the question I actually wanted answered. Why does this take so long, and where does the money go?
In this one we go through:
- What Capital Delivery is, and why the pothole on your street belongs to a different department
- Why rebuilding one mile of street costs about $20 million
- The four to five year clock on a street project, and where the years actually go
- Why the urban core is harder: hundred year old pipes, maps that are wrong, and the archaeology
- Potholing, the practice of digging first so the design does not fall apart later
- Why Bandera Road is not a city street, and what that means when you call to complain about it
- The Seeling Channel, phase four of a drainage project that started back in 2007
- What taking a home out of the floodplain actually involves, and why it saves people thousands a year
- Where street maintenance sits in this year's budget, answering a question from Dawn on Instagram
- More than 4,000 miles of street in San Antonio, and the roughly 400 that are graded failed
- What a failed street is, and why the city grades every street A through F like a report card
- The contractor scorecard, and the seven or eight companies the city will not hire back
And the part that stayed with me: none of this work gets a ribbon cutting. It is the stuff underneath everything else.
Send this to whoever is complaining about the construction on their street.
The Transparency Tour is a mini series made in partnership with the office of Councilwoman Marina Alderete Gavito, District 7.
If this episode helped you see San Antonio a little differently, subscribe to the channel. It genuinely helps. And if you want to go deeper, join me on Patreon for first look at upcoming guests and to support the show directly: https://www.patreon.com/LorenzoGomezIII
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