Nine months after Aurora began a new program to improve roads across the city, 27 neighborhoods have been re-paved and there is still work to be done.

Build Up Aurora, a two-year maintenance program to improve roads in 35 Aurora neighborhoods, began at the beginning of the year after city council approved a plan to fund the improvements.

Many of the roadways being addressed have not had large-ticket maintenance done on them for ten or more years, according to Aurora Public Works engineering supervisor Nicholas Johnson.

“I see immense value for the community on this,” Johnson said. “I’ve gotten quite a bit of positive feedback from people noticing roads that have been getting work done after a long time.”

So far, the project work scheduled for this year is about 77% done, Johnson said. They have completed road work on 27 neighborhood roads, four collector roads and four arterial roads. Five other neighborhood roads are in progress and six neighborhood roads, along with 13 collector roads, are pending.

The total map of roads being worked on is available on the city’s website.

In most years, street maintenance is funded through the city’s general fund — which is generally put toward arterial and collector roads.

Aurora Councilmember Dustin Zvonek, the program’s sponsor, presented the idea as a non-councilmember about three years ago, with the goal of closing a two-decade funding gap for road maintenance, he said.

The funding gap started around the 2008 recession, when government in Aurora cut funding for roads, since that was one of the easiest cuts to make at the time, Zvonek said.

Once he was elected to council, Zvonek worked with his colleagues to borrow additional funding for Build Up Aurora to restore frequent maintenance to neighborhood roads.

From 2023 to 2027, the city will invest $165.5 million into road maintenance, with portions of residential streets completed during each year of work.

The work in 2023 and 2024 is funded using Certificates of Participation, which use tax-exempt lease structure to finance construction and improvement to public facilities.

After 2024, the work will be funded through a separate Transportation Maintenance Fund.

In deciding which roads had the highest need for maintenance, Johnson and his team referred to what they call the “pavement condition index,” which ranks the quality of every road in the city every four years.

Each road gets an aggregate score of zero to 100 and Johnson’s team analyzed the data to determine which streets were in highest need, he said.

Zvonek, who is an avid cyclist, has seen roads that used to be in pretty rough shape finally repaired and feels the improvements when he rides, he said.

He also hears from community members who are happy that their local government is tackling the issue, he said.

City resident John Jetchick, who is also the interim president of the Highland Park East Neighborhood Association, said he is impressed with the city’s work on the roads in his neighborhood and their communication with community members.

“I think they just did a terrific job,” Jetchick said. “It was really well executed … for temporary inconvenience, what we’re getting is well worth it.”

The Highland Park East neighborhood looks better and is more comfortable to drive in after the improvements, Jetchick said. He has not spoken to anyone who is upset about the project because there is a comprehensive plan and the city has communicated it well to residents, he said.

Door hangers are posted at resident homes five days before work begins.

While the program has been successful, according to Johnson, Zvonek and Jetchick, the city had to deal with the hurdle of heavy rain this summer.

“We had about eleven weather days where we had to really be careful with how we were doing things,” Johnson said. “It did cause some trouble … but we’re still on track to finish in great time.”

For a city with over 4,300 lane miles of roadway — a number calculated by multiplying centerline miles by the number of lanes — having a sustainable maintenance cycle is vital to road quality, Johnson said.

“I hope it shows residents just how much of a difference this maintenance can make,” Johnson said. “We want to keep it a priority for the citizens and anyone they elect in the future … just keeping it so that we don’t get into another one of those points where we’re having deferred maintenance.”