Some neighborhood roads in the Saddle Rock neighborhood of Aurora have so many cracks and potholes, Bob Miller feels like he’s driving on a total “washboard road.”

The local metropolitan district president reached out to the city roughly a year ago, seeking help from his council representative, Mayor Pro Tem Francoise Bergan. The roads built in the late 1990s support more than 600 homes. Miller hoped the city could fix them up.

Bergan drove the streets with residents, agreed the roads were in bad shape, and has kept in touch since, he said, but also said the city could not fix the problem. The money, she told him, wasn’t there.

Miller is not the only resident waiting for road repairs.

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John Jetchick and Ed and Mercedes Martinez, residents of the Highland East Park neighborhood, love what their area offers. Nearby recreational amenities and medical centers as well as wide streets and mature trees. The homes started popping up in the 1950s and aren’t cookie-cutter. Each is unique, with character, they said.

“We call it ‘The Oasis,'” Jetchick said.

But the roads are starting to show their age, Jetchick said, with lots of cracks and visible signs that they need resurfacing.

On Thursday, the four turned out for the launch of what the city is calling the “Build Up Aurora” program, eager to learn how officials plan to address their concerns.

With a new funding plan, Aurora is kickstarting an initiative to catch up on 14 years of backlogged neighborhood road maintenance while keeping up with maintenance needs moving forward.

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Over the next two years, the first phase will address road maintenance in 35 neighborhoods identified as having the worst road conditions. Concrete repair begins this fall. Starting next year, the city will shift to paving work.

The fixes are long overdue, Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman said.

“We were really in a fairly desperate position.”

In all, nearly 60% of the city’s neighborhood roads are in critically poor condition, some to the point that if they are not fixed soon, they will need total replacement, Coffman said, which he called a far more disruptive and expensive undertaking.

“We have an opportunity to get caught up on our road maintenance, which is truly an obligation of the city of Aurora,” Coffman said.

Councilmember Dustin Zvonek had secured unanimous council support when he brought the proposal forward earlier this year.

His plan had three main tenets:

? First, it changed the way Aurora determines which streets need maintenance, switching from a set schedule to basing the decision on current road conditions.

? Then it created a Road Maintenance Fund that dedicated revenue from the general fund for capital projects to keeping neighborhood roads in “good” or better condition, based on the pavement condition index. The fund will not only provide continuing funds for road maintenance but prevent any confusion about where that money will from, Zvonek said. Between 2023 and 2027, Aurora plans to put $165.5 million toward roadway maintenance, with annual road maintenance work.

? Zvonek’s main goal was to address the road maintenance backlog without raising taxes, he said. He looked to leverage debt financing.

The City Council approved use of certificates of participation to fund $35 million in backlogged maintenance repairs. A certificate of participation, or COP, means the city uses its assets as collateral to borrow funding. That addressed one of the most looming challenges for Aurora’s road maintenance problem, he said: How would the city come up with $35 million?

The issue began snowballing amid the city’s response to the Great Recession, Zvonek said, when Aurora reduced annual road maintenance funding in an attempt to balance the budget.

“Well, they never caught up,” he said.

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The maintenance shortfall had a compounding effect, Zvonek said. Neighborhood roads went unfixed and the damage grew worse over time, until the city was looking at $35 million worth of needed maintenance.

Zvonek cited cracks in the road, big potholes, “the kind of stuff that when people are driving over, it’s hard on their cars, hard on their tires, hard on their suspension.”

Neighborhood roads have not been repaved since 2016, Zvonek said. It’s been a hot-button issue in local elections for nearly a decade, he said.

Bergan said at the launch event that recent surveys drove home the fact that roads are priority for city residents, but also that she’s also been hearing from constituents for years about the issue.

“I got tired of telling them ‘we don’t have enough money to fix your roads,'” she said.

The road-maintenance initiative is the result of listening to residents, she said.

Councilmember Alison Coombs called the initiative “a really exciting program” and one that the full council could rally behind. The project isn’t just about addressing the backlog but keeping up with maintenance annually, she said.

There is a five-year plan in place that residents will be able to access to see when their neighborhood roads are slated to be fixed, she said.

“Many people in my ward, Ward V, have been very excited for this program,” Coombs said.