MANCHESTER, NH – Manchester Board of Mayor and Aldermen last week received a presentation on the Manchester Department of Public Works plan to maintain the city’s 413 miles of roads.
Chief Highway Engineer Caleb Dobbins told the board that every three years a company looks at every public road in Manchester and analyzes things like pavement cracking or general distress to create a “pavement condition index,” or PCI, which is then combined with traffic volume, funding and other factors to determine when certain roads will be paved.
Ideally, Dobbins said that roads should be repaved every 10 to 15 years, with costs rising dramatically without repaving in that timeframe. Currently, Dobbins says there is a large backlog of streets in need of repaving from a $5.3 million allocation to repaving last year. He recommended to the board spending $12 million annually over five years to either repave or “microsurface” approximately 100 miles of road over the next 5 years, or about a quarter of all the roads.
Dobbins added that the yearly $12 million figure would help catch up for what had been inadequate past funding, and that inflation has hit construction harder than other areas making higher totals likely in the future if the $12 million/year is not allocated in FY 2026-2030.
On the 0 to 100 PCI scale, Dobbins and Department of Public Works Deputy Director Owen Friend-Gray said the average was 64, although most roads are above 50 and there is no specific geographical focus in certain part of the city where roads are better or worse.
In response to a question from Ward 4 Alderwoman Christine Fajardo, the Department of Public Works generally tries to keep neighborhood streets in comparable conditions to their neighboring streets, although some streets are taken out of order due to other public works initiatives going on in that area or severe conditions that require immediate road repair.
No action was taken by the board as the presentation was informational in scope. The slides from the presentation can be found below.