Waco lays out $93 million near-term streets program and a plan to raise 'good' streets to 67% in 10 years

WACO — The Waco City Council received an update June 3 on the Better Streets Waco program that quantified pavement condition, recent investments and a multi-year funding plan to improve the system.

Charles Leese, director of infrastructure services, told the council the city maintains about 1,534 lane miles of streets across roughly 100 square miles; pavement-condition scoring shows 38% of lane miles in poor condition, 19% in fair condition and 43% in good condition. "That's a pretty significant amount of poor pavement," Leese said.

Leese summarized investment and cost trends since Better Streets Waco began in 2019. He said the city has invested roughly $50 million to $65 million since 2019 (not including bridges, sidewalks, traffic signals and some grant-match funds) and that the 2015 funding baseline was about $15 million. Construction costs have risen sharply: staff presented TxDOT-based averages showing asphalt and labor cost increases that have pushed preservation, rehabilitation and reconstruction prices higher. On a per-square-yard basis Leese gave these approximate figures from the slide deck: preservation roughly $24 per square yard (up severalfold from earlier years), rehabilitation about $92 per square yard and full reconstruction about $420 per square yard — with a corresponding increase in lane-mile costs (for example, mill-and-overlay rehabilitation rose in staff examples from roughly $275,000 per lane mile in 2019 to about $702,000 in 2025).

Leese emphasized maintenance strategy. Using lifecycle modeling, staff showed that regular preservation treatments — surface seals and similar work timed before pavements fall from "good" into "fair" and then to "poor" — yield lower long-term costs and better ride quality than deferring maintenance and rebuilding once pavements fail. Leese described two illustrative 50-year examples: a preservation-first strategy whose cumulative cost was lower and that kept most years in a "good" condition, versus a deferred-maintenance approach that ultimately required more costly reconstruction and increased time the network spent in poor condition.

Funding and program status

Leese told the council he has roughly $93 million in combined unencumbered cash and bond-authorized funds available to the street program (including recent bond proceeds and cash), of which about $51 million has already been programmed into preservation, rehabilitation and reconstruction packages. That leaves roughly $42 million remaining to distribute among upcoming projects. Active work in the queue included about $7.5 million of preservation, $21 million of rehabilitation and about $13.8 million of reconstruction work; staff said they plan to advertise and bid additional packages through the summer.

To meet an objective shown in staff materials — raising the citywide share of "good" pavement from about 43% today to roughly 67% in 10 years — the administration estimated a need for roughly…