A Reflection of Santa Cruz PWD Overview by Director Matt Machado

Focus area for recapitulation: Environment

Santa Cruz Mountains

About Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz is a vibrant community with strong appreciation of the environment. At its heart it is a mellow beach town in California along the Highway one with urban — semi urban town character and close proximity to the silicon valley.

Location: Santa Cruz County, California

Size: 16 sqmi

Population: 64,522

Location map:

Located right at the beginning of Monterey Bay, California

Guest Speaker

Matt Machado, Public Works Director, Santa Cruz County

Overview

The Public Works Department oversees various sub-departments including administration, sanitation, flood control, recycling and waste treatment, sewage, transportation infrastructure, and large-scale capital projects in the city of Santa Cruz. Matt Machado, the director of Santa Cruz PWD, manages all these various aspects. The presentation reflected an understanding of administrative interaction amongst all these departments to provide the best possible services for the city’s interests that drive their budgets. PWD with a large annual budget of $155 million, has a wide range of projects that are pipelined. The capital projects are prioritized through a 5-year Capital Improvement Plan.

● Department overview: The department largely is subdivided into four branches, Administrative services, Capital Projects, Transportation and Special services including flood control, storm water management.

● Major accomplishments: Felton library with an adjacent developed park, Lift station replacement, Sewer extension, Culvert repairs, Resource recovery of landfill, roadside mowing, pothole patching along with maintenance of 600 miles of roadways.

● Budgets for public works: $155 million is the proposed budget for 2020–21. This is a $10 million drop from the previous year’s adopted budget. With transportation division absorbing these cuts, this year the budget is almost evenly distributed between administrative services, transportation and special services.

Similarities across various departments:

1. Public Works provide services which homeowners rely upon and pay for through property taxes, gas tax and utility fees.
2. Essential services such as roadway maintenance, wastewater treatment and sewage, flood control, and recycling and solid waste are programs run by public works. Public Works also administers County Service Areas (CSA).
3. Capital projects that may impact homeowners more evidently, such as street improvements and flood control are mostly addressed based on emergencies due to which other proposed projects are pushed down.
4. The costs and the budgets of proposed projects evidently reflect shortages all the time and they need to be carried over to the next annual budgets.
5. The Public works have a very limited staff, the department acknowledges this fact and plans accordingly while taking advantage of technology at the same time.

Eco-sensitivity:

1. There are many aspects of environment covered under the capital improvements plans. However, most of the other scenarios apart from transportation, are only addressed through collaborations and linkages with different administrations. Nonetheless, these issues are bolstered by having dedicated budgets by public works.
2. Environment Planning supports every other project in PWD. Every project must go through at a minimum CEQA review, which is the federal element for project delivery.
3. Most of the environment-sensitive projects are driven by the government. Various other concerns regarding neighborhood issues by homeowners need to be driven by forming CSA’s through a four-step process.
4. A special services division takes care of: Recycling solid waste and flood control.
5. Storm damage consumes a large pie of their expenditure. Due to the old infrastructure a reactive response is preferred.
6. Wildlife and coverts: larger coverts are constructed under creeks, biologist came in and proposed these for fish and wildlife to move across without coming on the the paved roads.
7. With the local coastal programs coming up with proposals dealing with the sea level rise. The PWD is gearing with its infrastructure to support the mission for the coastal plans to come to a fruition.

Takeaway

The Public works department continuously pushes the envelope to strike a balance between the urban growth and its environment. Dealing with aspects from sea level rise to conserving its judicious ecological system.