Mayor Rahm Emanuel today announced that the City would add $15 million in funding to add 13 more miles to the 2014 arterial street repaving plan and bolster a program to perform patching work on hundreds of streets across Chicago.

"With this additional investment to improve our infrastructure, we are Building a New Chicago and improving the quality of life in every community," Mayor Emanuel said. "We are increasing our workload, once again, to further combat the pothole-filled condition of many of Chicago's arterial streets caused by the extremely harsh winter weather."

Last month, the mayor announced that City agencies and private utilities plan to resurface a total of 333 miles of arterial and neighborhood streets and alleys in 2014. The additional funds will add to the overall program and provide flexibility for CDOT to respond more quickly to deal with the effects one of the worst winters in history.

The $15 million for paving is surplus funding from the past several years that was available from federal grants. Repaving projects are eligible to be funded by these grants.

CDOT is using $2 million to implement an expanded program of heavy duty patching for streets that do not need a full resurfacing, but have shown deterioration from winter.

In Mayor Emanuel's first term in office, nearly a quarter of Chicago's 4,600 miles of streets will have been resurfaced.

Under the mayor's Building a New Chicago infrastructure investment program, CDOT, the Department of Water Management (DWM), private contractors and utilities will have resurfaced more than 1,000 miles of streets of streets from 2011 through 2014 (155 miles in 2011; 269 miles in 2012; 290 miles in 2013; and 346 miles in 2014).

DWM plans to increase their workload in 2014, to installing 85 miles of new water mains, 21 miles of new sewer mains, relining 51 miles of sewer mains, and install 15,000 new water meters. DWM will also repave 133 miles of roadway.

In 2014, CDOT plans to repave nearly 100 miles of arterial streets, 90 miles of residential streets and five miles of alleys. Gas, electric and telecommunication utilities are expected to repave 20 miles of streets as part of their infrastructure work.

With better coordination on infrastructure improvement projects through CDOT's Project Management Office, both departments and the utilities worked together to reduce the amount of project conflicts that would open up a street more than once. By setting new standards for restoring the public way after construction, the various utilities resurfaced more miles of Chicago streets.

In 2013, the City realized a savings of approximately $14 million through the coordination of projects with utilities and the requirements that they fully restore the roadways after their construction projects.

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