He knows OV’s roads

Published on December 03, 2024

By Dave Perry

For the Town of Oro Valley

Oro Valley had one traffic signal light, at Lambert and La Cañada, when Jose Rodriguez came to work for the Town of Oro Valley in 2000.

Today, the town has 21 traffic signals, three “hawk” signals for pedestrians, and two roundabouts.

A quarter-century ago, the segment of La Cañada between Lambert and Naranja was the only four-lane divided roadway in the town’s portfolio. “Everything else was two-lane,” he said, “except Oracle,” the state highway that is Oracle Road.

Much has changed.

Without looking it up, Rodriguez, Oro Valley’s Engineering Division manager, can tell you the town is now responsible for 440 lane miles of roadway. More than half of those miles are “local streets,” within subdivisions. There are 82 miles of “collectors,” roads like Naranja, and 100 lane miles of “arterials” such as La Cañada and Tangerine. They carry “most of the traffic, from point A to point B,” he said.

It appears Rodriguez knows every square inch of every road.

“My job is to take care of the roadways,” Rodriguez said, and by any measure he and the Public Works Department are doing it well. High-quality roads are a point of pride for the community. Rodriguez, Town Engineer Paul Keesler, and many others are responsible for keeping them in excellent condition.

Elected leaders provide consistent financial support. This year, Oro Valley’s council-approved Pavement Preservation Program spends upwards of over $3 million a year on surface treatments where they’re most urgently needed. Fog seals. Chip seals. Mill and overlay.

No solutions are “cheap,” he said; some are “less expensive” than others, Rodriguez said. But the money must be spent, he argues. It’s a matter of economics. Oro Valley might spend $2 per square yard to fog seal a new road, extending its life. When a road is badly deteriorated, and “you can’t fix it anymore,” it costs $25 to $30 a square yard to rebuild.

Oro Valley is “doing all we can” to preserve its roadway system, and finds itself “in a very good position right now,” Rodriguez said. “Our roadway network is pretty well built out. All we have to do now is maintain them.”

He wanted to build bridges

When Rodriguez came from the City of Tucson to become the town’s civil engineering designer, Town Engineer Bill Jansen told him “we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”

Rodriguez was particularly intrigued by three bridges to be designed and built on La Cañada, Pusch View Lane, and First Avenue. “I was never going to work on a bridge in the city of Tucson,” said Rodriguez, a graduate of Cholla High School and the University of Arizona. Those bridges “really caught my eye.” He wanted a hand in designing and building them.

Once bridges were built, Rodriguez dug into the next project. And the next. Projects came “one right after the other,” he said. “Easily, more than $100 million, more like $150, $160 million.”

On Tangerine Road, “we took out the valleys and hills” within the town limits. Rodriguez “can’t imagine Tangerine being two lanes right now.”

North of Tangerine was “all desert,” but Oro Valley extended La Cañada toward Moore Road the Tortolita Mountains. “There was nothing out there” ... other than a healthy, 200-year-old saguaro right in the middle of the intersection. “We moved it a little bit to get it out of the way, 50, 60 feet,” he said.

Over time, Rodriguez advanced to project manager, then senior civil engineer, and now Engineering Division manager. He oversees the construction and maintenance of all-weather roads, with “multi-modal” pathways, attached and detached, for cyclists and pedestrians alike.

“We don’t have bike lanes in Oro Valley,” he said. “People want multi-use paths. It’s standard, now.”

Most of the money to do all this came from state and regional sources such as the Pima Association of Goverments and its Regional Transportation Authority.

“Without PAG money, there is a lot we wouldn’t have been able to afford,” Rodriguez said. “If it wasn’t for the RTA, the Northwest would look a lot different.”

Every manual you can imagine

Rodriguez’s tiny office on the town campus is filled with lanyards, hard hats, and rocks he’s collected. Bookshelves are stuffed with manuals. He pulls one off the crammed shelf. “Asphalt Rubber, 2006,” is its title, and it’s thick.

For its noise buffering and alleged wearability, “we all jumped on the asphalt rubber wagon,” Rodriguez said. “It worked great, for a while.” But the material couldn’t stand up to frequent lane changes and U-turns. “Lo and behold, the asphalt rubber fell apart,” he said. Crack sealing and resurfacing were “no longer effective.” So, asphalt rubber is on the way out on most Oro Valley roads.

Rodriguez doesn’t spend much time in that office. He’s in the field, looking at construction projects, identifying issues and “making a call” about how to solve them.

“Getting buy-in from the public” must be achieved when projects are proposed, he said. “You’ve got to hear out the adjacent property owners. We like to get their input. I want to hear from the people,” particularly in the design phase.

“We do our best to accommodate the residents,” Rodriguez said. “If we don’t do it now, we’re going to hear about it when it’s built.”

Years ago, roadwork was prioritized by citizen complaints. Rodriguez knew Oro Valley needed “to come up with a program, a system.” He got the town to purchase a copy of the software program Cartegraph, paying $20,000 “for a little disc like this, in a little envelope. I asked, ‘where are the manuals?’ ‘It’s on the disc,’” he was told.

Today, Oro Valley uses the software to manage roads, its fleet, water system, and parks and recreation facilities.

He knows the details

Drive with Rodriguez, and he can point out the what, the why, and the how of Oro Valley’s road infrastructure.

There’s a little curve on La Cañada north of Naranja, with a low wall on the west side, to fend off golf balls. Two retaining walls on the south side of Lambert east of La Cañada are a combination of soil-nailed fascia and gravity block walls to keep the nearby hill intact.

“I can talk for hours on roads,” Rodriguez said. “They took over 20 years to build, and I need a whole day to talk about them.”