Long Beach is spending historic amounts of money trying to fix its deteriorating streets, but it cannot say if it’s spending that money effectively, a recent city audit has found.
These findings, among others, were contained in an 84-page report recently released by City Auditor Laura Doud, which compared the cost and status of road repairs from 2020 to 2024 in Long Beach to a dozen other areas, including the city and county of Los Angeles, San Jose and San Francisco.
Examining road studies from 2018 to 2023, auditors found local streets were highly deteriorated compared to other cities. More than 150 miles of city roads had fallen into the worst-rated condition. As of 2023, more than a third of city streets were in “poor” or “very poor” shape. These roads are in such disrepair that they cannot be patched and must be resurfaced.
Long Beach ranked among the worst of any municipalities studied, with one of the lowest pavement quality grades despite spending $310 million on road repairs since 2020.
Historically, Long Beach has neglected its streets, according to Doud, but it’s ramped up spending in recent years, appropriating $47.9 million in 2022 and $87.3 in 2023. Despite this surge of funding, the city’s overall pavement score decreased that year from 58 to 56 out of 100.
Officials redoubled the following year, budgeting $83 million for streets in 2024. They also appropriated $53 million in 2025, which amounts to $52,527 spent per mile of road — the second-most of any city or county in the study.
By comparison, San Diego spent $13,939 per mile, Seal Beach spent $23,352 and the county of Riverside earmarked $17,936. Orange County, which budgeted about $8,000 more per mile, has a pavement score of 81.
It’s unclear Long Beach’s major investment will result in a score of at least 60, which is the city’s immediate target. The city is currently compiling its latest report on street conditions and will release its findings later this year. Public Works Director Eric Lopez would not speculate about the results.
“I’m not a betting man,” Lopez said. “I’m going to wait and see what the data shows.”
Despite spending markedly more than other municipalities, Doud doesn’t expect Long Beach’s recent spending to result in dramatic improvement.
In future budgets, she said the city would need to spend at least $73.2 million annually to bring its pavement score up to 60. To fix the majority of its streets and score an 85 — putting it slightly ahead of Seal Beach and Orange County — would require the city to spend $1.4 billion over five years, according to Doud.
Exacerbating the problem, auditors also pointed out a host of shortcomings in the way the Department of Public Works uses the money it already has — arguing the issue stretches beyond a lack of funding.
The audit found the city department had no complete repository of information, or “single-source of truth” where officials can accurately track and provide data on the cost and timelines of their street projects.
Instead, Doud’s team found critical project data to be gathered in a way that was inconsistent or inaccessible, with managers unable to show how many roads have been repaired, what it cost and whether it was done on time.
Project managers who tracked these data points compiled them in individual spreadsheets with “no standardized system,” auditors say,” resulting in “inconsistency across project teams.”
Without a single body of data to examine, auditors spot-checked a handful of projects, including one where they found project bids that ran on average 34% over engineers’ estimates. Auditors weren’t able to assess what caused those inflated estimates or how much the project ultimately cost.
The result, Doud said, is that the city cannot say how much has been spent to fix a given road, when it will get fixed and, in the event it runs over budget, offer an explanation.
“So, even though we’re investing millions and millions of dollars every year, we don’t know if we’re doing a good job, cost-effectively,” Doud said. “Are we being cost-effective? Are there cost overruns? We can’t tell you.”
In its 34 recommendations, the auditor’s report said the city should implement new ways to track and maintain project data. It should also create a master document and schedule that outlines all required reporting for every project, to make sure money is being spent the right way.
The auditor and department officials agree the city is up against a daunting problem, with an enormous backlog of street repairs, the result of decades of shoestring budgets that forced the city to defer maintenance. According to a 2009 report, the city spent a fraction of its current budget on repairs and maintained a far lower pavement score of 42.4.
“The city’s streets have been neglected for a long time,” Doud said.
Amid competing priorities, there has been a historical pressure on the City Council to invest elsewhere. As a result, the easiest places to trim the budget, she said, “are those that you’re not hearing from. And the streets aren’t speaking.”
Long Beach Public Works agreed to 32 of the audit’s findings, saying they have already implemented or planned to establish new standards for how it tracks projects.
On the issue of data and formatting, Lopez said it was standard years back for engineers to use applications like Excel spreadsheets when there was a paltry $10 million budget to work with.
Since the creation of the department’s Transportation Project Management Bureau in 2023, Lopez assures the department is far more organized and has “a lot of momentum.”
“I think we have the right organizational structure,” Lopez said. “I think we have the right staffing, and I think as we fill in all of our positions, we’re going to be in a better position to better manage and deliver those projects.”
As for tracking projects, Lopez said it’s very difficult to say whether a particular street project is or will be on time or under budget. Considerations, he said, need to be made for a “volatile construction market” where the availability of materials and workers ebb every hour or day.
“When oil goes from $60 to over $100 a barrel, that impacts us,” Lopez said. “When steel increases by 20% year over year, that has a major impact. When fuel costs increase by 10%, 15% that has a major impact. When you know equipment costs increase by, you know, 60%, 70%, 80% and it is impossible to stay on budget, a lot of those increases.”
Lopez, who took the helm of the department in 2020, said public works is doing more street repair “than we’ve ever done in a generation.” In FY 2024, it repaved 135 miles of streets and alleyways, slurry sealed more than six million square feet, installed nearly 7 miles of bike lanes, filled 48,000 potholes and replaced nearly 4,000 traffic and street signs.
The city disagreed with two findings in Doud’s report, arguing against the auditor’s suggestion to focus on minor networks, which include residential streets. Tackling the most battered streets — which account for 41% of the city’s backlog — would chew up so much cash that the city would be unable to prevent salvageable ones from sliding into disrepair, according to Public Works officials. Unless the city gets a lot more money, they say, the worst roads will remain the worst.
“Those are the most expensive streets to repair,” Lopez explained. “They are the most deteriorated, they are the most dangerous. They are the ones where you kind of need a complete rebuild. Do I have the money to do those streets right now? I do not.”
Lopez’s department said it will advocate for more money to hire full-time staff and for a new infrastructure bond to “fully fund the needed arterial pavement rehabilitation,” which is expected to range between $24 to $47 million annually.
And any bond would stack atop the city’s current $90 million bond — approved in 2023 — which sets aside $41.35 million for road work.
Funding for city roads comes from more than a dozen sources, from state, federal and county governments, Measure A — a local sales tax approved by voters in 2016 and extended indefinitely by voters in 2020 — L.A. County Measure M and state grants. Of the $458 million generated by the Measure A sales tax between 2017 and 2023, about 16%, or $74 million, went to mobility and safety projects, including street projects.
Although Doud agreed with the need for more money, the auditor insisted that Long Beach Public Works has enough staff to adequately address its backlog and reverse the city’s course. Doud said the city should be tracking costs down to the dime, keeping timelines of projects from start to finish, and budgeting and tracking staff hours.
“But nobody’s doing that,” she said.
The auditor’s office later said in a statement Thursday that the city could use additional staffing to help overhaul its data and tracking systems, as the audit recommended. In the past four years, department staffing has increased by more than 25%, adding roughly 142 employees.
Under the status quo, Doud said, city streets may improve slightly in the immediate future because of the surge of funding in 2024, but she expects it to decline over the next three years, down to a pavement score of 47 by 2028, well under the already low-end goal of 60.
If Long Beach wants well-paved roads, the current investment is “not going to cut it,” she said.