City and county leaders during last week’s intergovernmental meeting discussed sharing equipment across jurisdictions as a way to cut down on expensive road maintenance costs.
“You guys have a striping truck and we don’t,” San Juan Bautista Mayor Chris Martorana told the gathering of policymakers and top level staff from Hollister and San Benito County. “Maybe we should pay you to do the striping or work it out internally. It would be more collaborative on the planning side and we could direct staff to make every effort to line up what they’re doing [to what is going on elsewhere]. So if there’s extra asphalt, it doesn’t get dumped in some holding area. It goes to the City of San Juan Bautista to fill in something over here.”
Hollister Mayor Ignacio Velazquez said representatives need to know what road equipment is available to share. Hollister Vice Mayor Karson Klauer said that was more of a staff question.
“We just don’t have the knowledge base to make those decisions here,” Klauer said. “We’ll never know what we can actually do until we have staff tell us what equipment we have and whether it’s not being used because we don’t have the manpower for it.”
Hollister City Manager Bill Avera said he could look into what road equipment was going unused in Hollister. Louie Valdez, an analyst for the county, said the Resource Management Agency just completed an inventory of all equipment in San Benito County and he could share the information with the council.
San Juan Bautista Vice Mayor Jim West, County Supervisor Jerry Muenzer and Superintendent of Schools Krystal Lomanto were also in attendance. County Administrative Officer Ray Espinosa, San Juan Bautista City Manager Roger Grimsley and San Benito High School District Trustee Bill Tiffany were absent.
