El Paso County emphasizes preservation to extend road life, reports PCI gains

El Paso County engineer Josh Palmer said the county is shifting from a "worst-to-first" repair approach to a preservation-first strategy intended to extend pavement life and reduce long-term costs. "By maintaining a road now, you can defer the cost," Palmer said, noting preservation can extend a pavement's life from about 20 years to as much as 40 or 50 years in some cases.

Palmer explained how the county uses the pavement condition index (PCI), a 0-to-100 industry metric adopted in 2022, to guide preservation and paving decisions. He said the county's multi-year goal is to raise the average PCI by about 1.1 points per year; that target has been met or exceeded for the past four years and the county's current PCI is "just under 72," which Palmer described as "good".

The county typically budgets roughly $20–25 million annually for its paving and preservation program across all revenue sources, Palmer said. One year of additional federal aid from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) temporarily raised program capacity to about $45 million, which increased work but strained contractor availability and in-house inspection and management resources.

"We doubled the budget, we doubled the work," Palmer said, describing difficulty securing contractor schedules and sufficient consultant support to cover soft costs such as inspection and construction management. He said workforce and materials availability, and seasonal limits on paving months, constrain how much the county can execute even when funding increases.

Palmer framed preservation as a cost-efficiency choice: full reconstruction costs 10–14 times more than preservation techniques, and the county prioritizes keeping "good roads good" to defer expensive rebuilds. He added the county maintains an annual list of projects that feeds into a five-year paving and preservation plan.

Palmer also pointed to coordination with regional funding sources. He said PPRTA (Pikes Peak Rural Transportation Authority), a 1% sales tax distributed among member agencies, is the county's most consistent source, and that grants and congressionally directed spending are used when available. "We just got approved for a couple of big projects," he said, naming a Constitution project in Peterson and a Palmer Park Drainage project funded through a federal earmark.

Palmer concluded that long-term planning and realistic public communication about timelines and trade-offs are central: "Let's be realistic about setting expectations," he said, emphasizing transparency when schedules or budgets change.

The county's next steps include continuing the five-year preservation planning cycle, monitoring PCI trends, and balancing budget increases with realistic assessments of contractor and internal capacity.