Matt Machado joined Santa Cruz County in June of 2018. Currently, he serves as the Deputy Chief Administrative Officer and Director of Community Development & Infrastructure. Machado earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Civil Engineering at California State University Fresno and his Master’s Degree in Business Administration at California State University Stanislaus.
Machado has faced many challenges since taking the position, but the most persistent issue was one he inherited and locals are all too familiar with: bad roads.
“Our road system is currently failing,” says Machado, referencing a key metric. The Pavement Condition Index (PCI), developed by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, measures road quality on a scale from 0 to 100, with 100 indicating a newly paved road, Machado explains. Factors like pavement age, climate, traffic loads and maintenance funding impact the PCI score. “While the state average is in the mid-60s, our roads score in the mid-40s, placing us among the worst in California.”
Machado realizes it will take a partnership between the residents of Santa Cruz and county administrators to avoid a catastrophic road failure.
“It is almost certain that we will ask the people to tax themselves further for dedicated road improvements,” says Machado, who understands the emotions behind increased taxation but feels the issue is too big to ignore. “It will take people getting together and recognizing that our roads are important to every aspect of our lives. As a community we need to work with the local governments to fix the problem. Working together, we can solve this.”
Machado is transparent about the budget limitations he faces when it comes to prioritization. Surprisingly, the core financial issues and insecurity Santa Cruz County deals with date back to 1978.
“The implementation of Prop 13 was a formula the state created and they looked at spending levels in each county and they locked everybody into those spending rates. It worked out to be a percentage of property tax that stayed local and the rest went to the state. Santa Cruz was fiscally conservative back then and resulting formula share means we only keep 13% of the property tax; the rest goes back to the state and that puts us at a tremendous disadvantage as compared to other counties which retain almost double that on average.”