City Council Bumps Google Fiber, Tackles Crummy Roads

This week’s City Council meeting could be over in the time it takes the mayor to tell a meandering public commenter that his time is up. A discussion of an agreement for San Jose to install Google Fiber, amongst several other items, was deferred to the May 13 session. (For more information on the project, the Silicon Valley Business Journal has the low down on the creation of “ultra-high speed” Internet access huts.)

The only item expected to receive much attention at Tuesday's meeting is a $12 million award to Bay Cities Paving And Grading Inc., which placed a bid to resurface “31 miles of arterial streets” in San Jose. Among the roads slated for repaving are state route 82 along Monterey Road, Santa Clara Street and The Alameda.

According to a staff report, in November 2011 the state agreed to relinquish all ownership and operating costs for State Route 82 and State Route 130—as well as $12,410,000—if the city came up with $1.45 million to “to rehabilitate the pavement on these routes.”

The work will include “a combination of cold-in-place recycling of exiting pavement, rubberized asphalt overlay, and surface sealing as needed,” according to staff.

Eight bids were received eight bids in total, and staff pared that list down to three: Bay Cities, MCH Services and Granite Rock Company. The companies, asked to prove their compliance with the Disadvantage Business Enterprise (DBE) program, then began to protest each others’ bids in a bit of gamesmanship.

Obviously, Bay Cities came out victorious.

Also on the San Jose City Council agenda for May 6, 2014:

Josh Koehn is a former managing editor for San Jose Inside and Metro Silicon Valley.

6 Comments

  1. Well waddya know. Paving roads. It’s nice to see, for once, the City getting involved in something that it SHOULD be getting involved in.
    On the other hand, WTF is this f***ing Disadvantage Business Enterprise program? Never mind. That’s a rhetorical f***ing question. I know what it is. It’s yet another “progressive” way that our City wastes the hard earned money of it’s taxpaying residents.

  2. I’d rather the work be done by the best paving contractor, not the most PC paving contractor.

    June election–vote against incumbents

  3. “According to a staff report, in November 2011 the state agreed to relinquish all ownership and operating costs for State Route 82 and State Route 130” I love it– “relinquish”. What it means is that the state will no longer maintain these roads as has been done probably for decades; but they use nice words to bamboozle the idiots into believing this is a good thing. Everyone knows what a poor record San Jose has regarding road maintenance.

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