Park Drive will be closed from Central Avenue to 1st Avenue North from June 9-10 for street preservation work.
City crews will be conducting the work.
Detour signage and traffic control will be in place and drivers are asked to plan alternate routes and to use caution in
the area.
The work is part of the city’s pavement maintenance program, which is intended to improve roadway conditions and extend the life of the city street network.
For more information, please contact the Street Division at 406-771-1401.
In April, city staff discussed the overall street network condition and told City Commissioners they were recommending a 7.5 percent annual increase for the upcoming budget year toward a 15-year plan to increase the overall network score to 80, which has an estimated $75 million budget gap currently.
During the April 1 commission work session, Chris Gaub, city public works director, said that residents probably want a better rated street network, but probably don’t understand or support the associated costs.
To rehabilitate one block of a city street costs about $500,000, Eric Boyd, city streets division manager, said.
The overall condition index, or OCI, is the city’s system to measure and monitor city streets and rates their level of service, which ranges from failed to excellent.
“An excellent level of service comes with an excellent level of cost,” Boyd said.
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To have that high level of service on city streets, it has to be funded, but failed streets cost less now, but those costs will eventually catch up to the city, he said.
City streets lose about 60 percent of their quality in about 75 percent of their lifecycle, or about 20 to 30 years, Boyd said, so investing in rehabilitation or maintenance saves money in the long run.
The OCI scores run from 0 to 100, looking at pavement condition, roughness and other factors.
Boyd said the streets division uses the OCI to inform their decisions about maintenance and rehabilitation.
Historically, city staff developed the OCI through windshield surveys but last year, the city contracted for data collection.
Under that contract, the contractor drove all city streets twice with specialty equipment that scans the roadways for conditions.
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The OCI also looks at the age of the street, age of utilities under the street, curb and gutter and street classifications.
Boyd described the current network score of 68.4, as a “pretty okay condition.”
The pavement condition index component of the score is 74, which is above the national average, Boyd said.
Ninety-five percent of city streets are in fair to excellent condition, Boyd said, and about 73 percent need major work ranging from chip seal to replacement.
According to the streets division’s April 1 presentation to commissioners, 3.83 percent of city streets are in poor condition and 1.14 percent are failed.
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Boyd said that since the city’s 2013 survey of the city street network, the overall condition index score improved by seven points, due to the city’s efforts to continually maintain roads.
He said they’ve focused on the fair streets to get them repaired before they turned into poor and failed streets.
“Conditions are always changing, one bad winter can upset this graph in major ways,” Boyd said.
Boyd said that all major Montana cities assess their street network in some fashion, but Great Falls was the only community doing a full survey, something they presented on at a conference last year.
Great Falls isn’t alone in their street network score, which Boyd said many communities nationwide have a D+ rating, according to the American Society for Civil Engineer’s 2025 U.S. infrastructure report card, and the estimate to improve by one grade nationally is $2.58 trillion.
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The cost to fix all of Great Falls’ street network now would cost an estimated $91 million, Boyd said, which would require about a 1,500 percent increase in the street assessment for the upcoming budget year.
To hold at the current level, there’s no budget gap, but streets would continue to deteriorate, potentially dropping the overall network score.
To increase to an overall network score of 70, there’s a $14 million budget gap and the street assessment would need to increase by about 1.5 percent annually for 15 years.
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City staff are recommending a 7.5 percent annual increase for the upcoming budget year toward a 15-year plan to increase the overall network score to 80, which has an estimated $75 million budget gap currently.
Boyd said conditions can change so it’s not responsible to set the street assessment rate for multiple year.
The city sets the streets assessment annually as part of its budget process, which includes public hearings, typically in July.
Boyd said development will be a factor in future years and the city may need to increase the standards on new roads.
