With federal funds, county announces big road projects
Kern County unveiled its plans this week to pave over 17 miles of new roads and sidewalks in neighborhoods across the county, as its decided use of money received through the American Rescue Plan Act.
Last year, the county was awarded $30 million from ARPA to pay for infrastructure in areas the federal government deemed a “qualified census tract.”
According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, these areas must have households with incomes below 60 percent of the area’s median gross income, or have a poverty rate of 5 percent or more.
“This $30 million couldn’t have just been spent anywhere,” said Ryan Alsop, Kern County’s chief administrative officer. “This money could only be used in federally designated census tracts.”
The projects will be a combination of street, sidewalk and crosswalk improvements in Rosamond, Lake Isabella, Ford City, Mojave, Lamont and Oildale neighborhoods — areas that, in some cases, have been pending before the pandemic began.
“Keep in mind we had a pretty serious fiscal crisis right around the time I started in 2017,” Alsop said. “A lot of this stuff got put on hold, (then) we have COVID, so in determining where this would be spent, we had to wed community feedback, identify safety issues and areas with need of an upgrade with whether or not they were within a federally designated census tract.”
Kern officials plan to use $25 million to pay for the improvements, with another $5 million set aside as contingency funds, in case anything goes wrong.
In many areas of Kern, residents cannot walk to a store, school or park without entering the street, a simple quality of life not accessible to some people.
Sites were picked using recently completed traffic safety studies, Alsop
said.
Officials said that there are spots in Kern that have ongoing renovations or qualify for state grants of a similar scope that didn’t qualify for these federal monies.
“All of these improvements are tied to accessibility to major economic corridors, parks and schools,” Alsop said. “We have a lot of qualified census tracts in the area. But there are a lot of areas that aren’t.”
The largest improvement will happen in Oildale, with three total miles of renovation to Sequoia Drive, Willow Drive, Beardsley Street and East McCord Avenue. The roads all connect to Beardsley Jr. High School, as well as Riverview Park and Community Center, and to businesses on Chester Avenue and Roberts Lane.
“Because it’s not just necessarily the sidewalk,” said Samuel Lux, director of the Kern County Public Works Department. “There’s a lot involved with it, especially within established communities, it’s the curb, gutter and sidewalk, or tying into the roadway or landscaping, fences and other things people put in over the years. It’s not just pouring four inches of concrete.”
Lux and Alsop acknowledged that sidewalks are often the biggest expense to these kinds of projects. Beyond the cost of paving, crews have to carve out storm drains, move utility poles, insert waste basins and tear up land — in short, the easiest part of building sidewalks are the sidewalks themselves.
“When you’re working with a blank canvas, like a new development, you can get so much more out of your construction crews,” Lux said.
“Whereas when you go into an established community you have to move stuff out of the way and you can’t just rip up the entire neighborhood. You have to be methodical.”
Alsop said they are still working on a start date for the improvements, but said they will be finished within two years.
“We have a whole bunch of other work we’re doing (right now),” Alsop said. “But it is our intention to get this started as soon as possible.”