The Seattle Weekly–and I want to make it perfectly clear this likely has nothing at all to do with Mayor McGinn’s crusade to get the Weekly‘s parent company to stop profiting from juvenile sex trafficking–recently published this headline: “Pothole Claims in Seattle Increase Nearly Threefold Under Mayor Mike McGinn.”
Claims against the city for pothole damages totaled more than $88,000 in 2010-11, with 443 claims filed. That’s a “a 270% increase in the number of pothole claims submitted to the city and a 241% increase in the amount of money paid on those claims,” says the Weekly, compared to a four-year average of the preceding years.
But before your blood pressure spikes, keep in mind that last winter was a doozy. Commenter “Rick from SDOT” (communications manager Rick Sheridan) was quick to note: “In 2009 SDOT filled 6,504 potholes. In the first six months of 2011 alone SDOT filled 19,851 potholes.”
There are a number of things that have happened under McGinn’s administration–and some that didn’t happen–but it’s hard to see how decades-long neglect of Seattle’s roads can be pinned on him, or the city’s lack of money following the recession. (If Mayor McGinn is the real reason for the recession, and the Weekly has proof of that, I urge them to go public soonest, for all our sakes.)
The news here is not McGinn, but the City of Seattle’s resounding failure to deal with road maintenance in even a half-hearted fashion. Money flows to new road projects at the expense of keeping the roads we’ve already got in working condition. In December 2010, height of pothole season, I wrote about the refusal to make hard choices:
In Seattle, we can look around at our collapsing road infrastructure while we spend $50 million on the East Phase of the Mercer Street project. That bid came in 23 percent below estimates. Just for the record: $50 million for a single phase of a new project (totaling about $300 million), as compared to $23 million allocated for existing arterial asphalting. You can debate the merits of the project–they don’t call Mercer a mess for nothing–but what is clear is that embarking on new projects seriously compromises the city’s ability to maintain the roads we’ve already got.
But on the Council lately, only Nick Licata has really been fighting that fight. Rick Sheridan spells out the result of this kind of prioritization for you in his comment:
The large increase in the number of potholes is due to our aging roadways. Take an old roadway and expose it to repeated freeze and thaw cycles, and you get potholes. The real answer to potholes is to address the backlog of paving needs from decades of underfunding.
That is why the Bridging the Gap levy has paid for 128.3 lane-miles of new roads from 2007-2010. You can see the results on streets such as Second Avenue, Fourth Avenue and Stewart Street in downtown, Elliot Avenue W and 15th Avenue W through Interbay, First Avenue S in SODO, and this year’s work on 15th Avenue NE in the University District. But the fact remains that Seattle’s backlog of deferred arterial maintenance stands at approximately $578 million. [emphasis added]
As you can tell, much of the recent activity has been centered on downtown arterials. SDOT explains: “In March of 2008 the Seattle City Council unanimously passed an accelerated paving plan so that downtown streets will be completed by 2012 when the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement project begins.”
If Seattle was a private enterprise, McGinn would probably be bonused for looking after shareholders’ interests. Paying out not-quite $90,000 versus catching up on almost $600 million in arterial maintenance is the bargain of the century. Keep in mind that that is planned arterial maintenance alone; it’s not the cost of repaving crumbling city streets in general.
Anyway, that $578 million is disheartening because the Bridging the Gap levy was supposed to catch us up on maintenance. It was to raise $365 million over nine years, with no less than 67 percent of that going for road maintenance. (Over the first four years, 73 percent has gone toward maintenance, per the 2010 annual report.) But the math indicates that we are not catching up; we are falling even farther behind. If after nine years, the city returns to taxpayers with an offer to extend Bridging the Gap “one more time,” who will want to take them up on it?
The fault lies not in our stars, but in the ratio of maintenance spending to new road projects. Until SDOT realigns around an identity as primarily a maintenance department, until the City of Seattle directs and funds SDOT accordingly, we are going to see roads, especially residential and side streets, continue to decline alarmingly. There is no plan for neighborhood streets, and no extra money for them when arterial repaving demand alone outpaces supply. That’s not even getting into the condition of sidewalks around the city.
Crazy.
