What's at stake?
Over the last three or so years, the price tag for deferred maintenance on Fresno’s city streets has more than doubled, swelling to over $1 billion. The mayor says the city needs to act now.
About three years ago, the deferred maintenance on Fresno streets had an estimated cost of half a billion dollars.
Now, it’s more than doubled — about $1.2 billion — according to Public Works Director Scott Mozier.
During budget hearings Tuesday, Mozier explained to the Fresno City Council that not fixing damaged streets only increases the cost of maintenance down the road. Additionally, inflation has dramatically increased the cost to perform necessary road maintenance.
It’s a grim outlook for a city that expands its sprawling borders almost every month, but Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer said his proposed $100 million bond program will address the quality of city roads.
“The longer we wait to pave a road, pavement degradation occurs,” Dyer told Fresnoland in a brief Tuesday interview. “And the inflation has been far greater than we would anticipate, so if we don’t start paving now, we’re going to pay a lot more later.”
As Dyer explained last month, his goal is to pave roads at an accelerated pace over the next two to three years — the remainder of his final term as mayor. Despite the city undertaking the paving work over the next couple years, taking on the bond would allow the city to begin repayment on the required $100 million in 2029.
Dyer told Fresnoland that this isn’t about putting the next mayor’s administration in debt. He said he and all his predecessors have had to grapple with deferred road maintenance. Instead of letting that cycle continue, his proposal would save the city money in the long run.
“I think what would be unfair to the next administration is to have an increased level of deferred maintenance to the roads to deal with,” Dyer told Fresnoland. “Quite frankly, that’s what’s happened to my administration, and the administration before and the administration before.”
A full proposed project list was released by city officials Tuesday afternoon, which outlines a two year timeline for 51 street projects.
While Dyer and City Manager Georgeanne White have said the program wouldn’t increase costs for the city, it’s slightly more nuanced than that. The city is currently in repayment for a number of bonds using general fund resources — the discretionary bucket of funds that city officials can use for whatever purpose they’d like.
One annual expense, repayment on the city’s Pension Obligation bond, will roll off in 2029, Dyer said. That same year, instead of freeing up those general fund resources for other uses, the city would use it to begin repayment on the $100 million paving bond.
Dyer and White described it as repayment for the new paving bond replacing repayment on the old pension bond. Dyer added that the Pension Obligation bond’s annual payment — about $12.8 million in general fund resources in 2026 — is far larger than what repayment will be for the paving bond, which hasn’t been determined yet.
Dyer said the motivation for the $100 million paving bond came from not being able to fund much-needed paving projects in Fresno. Every year during budget hearings, councilmembers make budget motions, advocating for projects in their district to get funding.
A big chunk of those projects tend to be varying levels of road maintenance, and they don’t all end up included in the final budget proposal. Dyer said it’s no different this year, especially when road repairs cost millions of dollars and the city is operating on a tight budget for the 2026 fiscal year.
“I just got through spending the last few months finding ways to reduce our budget by $50 million,” Dyer said. “I know there’s not excess money in our budget to accommodate that.”
That need is where the $100 million paving bond came from. Dyer compared it to Alan Autry’s No Neighborhood Left Behind, which was a 20-year bond that sought to repair sidewalks all over Fresno.
“If we wait another five or six years, it’s going to be $2.5 billion (in deferred road maintenance), we will never get out of this mess,” Dyer told the City Council on Tuesday. “So I believe the responsible thing to do as a council and as my administration is to pave more now and pay later, because we’re going to pay less today than we will next year and the year after.”
Although Dyer didn’t have an exact figure Tuesday, he said deferred maintenance on Fresno streets will be much lower than the current $1.2 billion estimate after his paving program is complete.
