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Are Potholes Being Fixed? Bureaucrats Say Yes; Residents Say No
By D. Brian Burghart
Reno auto mechanic Jeff Kuklok is one of the few people in town who appreciates
the pathetic condition of Reno's potholed, rutted streets—at least they
keep him working.
“The potholes contribute quite a bit [to car damage],” says Kuklok
as he peers out from beneath a white Ford F-250 pickup at Tires Unlimited on
1120 Kietzke Lane. “You can hit one hard and it won't do anything, but
you can hit the same pothole soft and, depending on the car, the angle or whatever
the hell it is, it'll throw your alignment out.”
Shop owner Tim Buxton says Kuklok is one of the best in town at this sort
of work—and he'd better be. Tires Unlimited handles two to 10 alignments
daily, Kuklok says, at an average of $39 each. Tires Unlimited is just one of
the dozens of mechanics' shops that repair out-of-whack alignments.
There have always been plenty of battered undersides to go around. For years,
Reno's streets have been a source of endless frustration—for everyone except
auto mechanics. Especially during election years such as this one, politicians
promise to fix the streets, but residents never seem to see the tangible results
of all those campaign pledges. Many roads still look, feel and handle like a
Lake Tahoe hiking trail.
Will this year be any different?
Yes and no, according to city officials.
On one hand, a bundle of taxpayer dollars—$7.8 million—will go toward
road repair this spring and summer, but, according to a 20-year plan the City
Council adopted last year, it's going to be a good 15 years before the quality
of the streets begins to improve.
That should keep Kuklok happy for awhile. He says the weather during that
time will help Reno's streets retain that familiar washboard effect.
“The weather is harsh here,” Kuklok says. “During the winter
it gets cold, and during the summer, it gets really hot. I've also heard Reno
is on a really old river bed, and sand shifts.”
Tom Wilcox, another mechanic at Tires Unlimited, has personally felt the pain
of Reno's mean streets.
“My wheels are all bent up because of potholes,” he says. “I've
got a nice car with low-profile wheels. I've got to get new wheels because of
the potholes.”
Wilcox says he'll spend $1,000 on four new wheels.
“There's nothing I can do about it,” he adds dejectedly.
That kind of frustration is enough to send peeved residents to the ballot
box to vote for a change.
Reno political consultant Jim Denton says potholes are always a big issue
in local elections.
“I think the pothole problem to residents and voters is symbolic of local
government not being able to get anything done,” he says.
Denton says elections have “absolutely” been won or lost on the
public perception that nothing is being accomplished to make the roads smooth.
A politician's actions—or inaction—with regard to streets can haunt
him for years. For instance, former Mayor Pete Sferrazza is still known as “Pothole
Pete.”
“People want to see good roads,” says Denton, who consulted on some
of Sferrazza's campaigns. “When they don't, they really believe the government
is not working on a local level.”
If phone calls to local officials are an accurate barometer, the topic of
potholes continues to make politicians uneasy.
Among those who failed to return calls to the RN&R for this story are Reno
City Manager Charles McNeely, Mayor Jeff Griffin and City Councilmember Candice
Pearce.
Denton's own opinion about the condition of Reno roads diverges from the word
on the streets.
“I think the condition of the streets in Reno has dramatically improved
in the last few years,” Denton says.
Another person who says that Reno's mean streets are better than a few years
ago is Reno City Councilman and Chairman of the Regional Transportation Commission
Tom Herndon.
He says the reason it's going to be awhile before the improvements become
more obvious is: “It took more than 20 years to screw them up. The fact
that it's only going to take 14 years to fix them is phenomenal. There's been
more money poured into the city streets in the last five years than in the 20
years before. And if the revenues pick up, then the street program will pick
up accordingly. We've got a far better plan than we've had in the past.”
Still, he says, looking down the road, “If we don't identify some more
funding, at the end of the 20 years, we're still going to be in the hole.”
Road Warriors Stockhoff, principal engineer for the Public Works Department, says the reason
Reno's streets are bad goes back at least a decade to a budget crisis that strapped
the city.
“There was no preventative maintenance done on the streets back when
the budget crunch hit,” Stockhoff says. “It's like the Fram Oil Filter—you
can pay me now or you can pay me later. We're paying later. The streets went
with nothing for forever and a day, and after that they fell apart.”
Krause, street maintenance superintendent, has been with the Public Works
Department for 18 years. He takes a long view of the problem. Krause says that
in the 1980s, when fuel-efficient cars were gaining in popularity, the gasoline
tax revenues remained flat.
Even though there were many more cars on the road 10 years ago, they were
vastly more fuel efficient than the gas guzzlers of the 1960s and 1970s. That
means the newer cars were consuming the same amount of gasoline and producing
the same amount of tax, but they were chewing up more roadway because there
were more cars.
“In the '80s, when we went into a little bit of a recession, that revenue
dropped off a little bit, and we were forced to cut back,” Krause says.
“Then when it picked up a little bit, road maintenance started to pick
back up. We no sooner got started and we had to cut back again. You had streets
going up, revenues flat, traffic volume going up—so the gap widened, and
there was no way to make it up.”
If media accounts are any indication, choppy streets in Reno were a problem
well before the recession of the late 1970s and 1980s.
A July 4, 1973, Reno Evening Gazette story headlined “Patch inspector
seen as savior of streets” reported that a Washoe County grand jury found
there were problems with the city's monitoring of pothole patches.
In the article, city engineer Robert Sanford said there was simply not enough
money or personnel to keep up.
A quarter of a century later, the same rhetoric is floating around City Hall.
“For years, there wasn't a lot of work of any kind going on—whether
it was in the city of Reno, Washoe County or Sparks,” Stockhoff says. “There
was across-the-board reduction in the work taking place. Now all of a sudden,
you've got RTC [Regional Transportation Commission], who's doing $6 million
to $7 million in just Reno, plus our $8 million to $9 million, and you've got
NDOT [Nevada Department of Transportation]. The issues now are: Do we have enough
manpower? Do we have enough equipment?”
Stockhoff refuses to play the blame game. He says there's simply not enough
money to go around.
“It'd be easy to go back and say, 'I'm going to blame that person, or
that group, for not having any money,' but it really wasn't one person or group,
it was the whole environment,” Stockhoff says. “And it's not just
the city of Reno. It's an issue of revenue vs. need everywhere. For whatever
reason, infrastructure has been one of the last things on the list. It's an
issue that doesn't matter, whether it's streets, sewers or water.”
Some citizen activists, such as Michaelangelo Price, a former sitcom writer,
say the money is, and always has been, available. The real problem, he says,
is that the City Council has its priorities skewed. Council members recently
allocated money to at least triple the size of the city PR department to tell
citizens how good the streets are instead of just fixing them, he says.
“The City Council wastes money building monuments to themselves, like
the downtown theater,” Price says. “If I owned an alignment shop,
I'd move to Reno and buy a yacht. Reno drivers are learning to drive slalom
style.”
His wrath doesn't stop at the downtown theater or the potholes, or how money
that should go to potholes is being spent on the theater.
“What is the purpose of the [national] mayors' conference [in June]?”
he asks. “Reno Redevelopment is spending $145,000 to give to a local ad
agency that is owned by the mayor's campaign manager. Where is that money going?
It isn't going to the streets.”
In A Fog The formula, called the Pavement Condition Index, or PCI, ranges from 0 to
100.
Zero represents a street that's little better than a goat trail, while 100
reflects a newly paved street. In April 1997, the average street in Reno rated
61. There are about 98 million square feet of roads in Reno.
The breakdown of Reno streets in the 1995 Pavement Management Report went
like this:
“There was no preventative maintenance done
on the streets back when the budget crunch hit,”
Gary Stockhoff says.
“It's like the Fram Oil Filter—you can pay me now
or you can pay me later. We're paying later.”
While politicians and voters go round and round on the issue, city employees
such as Gary Stockhoff and Dennis Krause are out on the streets doing the hands-on
work.
The city uses a formula to categorize the streets so engineers can get a handle
on exactly how bad they are.
The PCI rating forms the basis of Reno's Street Program Strategic Plan, which was adopted last year.
The major goals of the strategic plan are to address the $188 million street repair backlog and to increase the PCI to an average of 70—or “very good”—over the next 20 years.
Right now, 51 percent of Reno streets fall at or below a rating of 70.
The city's strategy is fairly simple—reconstruct the worst streets (PCI of 0 to 40) over the next 20 years; resurface streets with a PCI of 41 to 55 over the next five years; and maintain the streets with a rating of 56 to 100.
“The new stuff doesn't need a bunch of maintaining,” Stockhoff says.
City officials say that maintaining the best streets is considerably cheaper than repairing the worst. Since the city has a limited budget, it can get more bang for its buck if it maintains the good streets. The PCI will slowly creep up as the worst streets are reconstructed.
The backlog consists of streets with a PCI of 40 or below—the “poor” to “failed” range.
| “We're stopping the bleeding,” Dennis
Krause says. “We're kind of saying, 'Everything at the bottom, there's nothing we can do about it; just rebuild it.” |
The Regional Transportation Commission is doing the majority of these repairs. In fact, according to Chuck Calloway, senior engineer technician for Reno pavement management, the city is only doing about a half a million square feet of reconstructs (0-10 PCI) this year.
As far as the city doing a very small percentage of the reconstructs, “That wasn't really in the plan, but that seems to be what is happening,” says Christopher Good, public communication coordinator for the city of Reno.
For the city, which assigns the streets that RTC will repair, it's all about how expensive it is to do the various types of repair and what the city's priorities are with respect to the strategic plan.
RTC owns no roads, and it doesn't do routine repairs, such as sealing cracks or filling potholes. It is funded with the regional road impact fee, which is assessed on all developments in the region, the Washoe County fuel tax and state and federal grants.
Stockhoff says the city's money is being spent in the most efficient manner.
“Overlays are the priority,” he says, “so if we've got around $8 million, a good $6 million of that is going to go for overlays and $2 million is going to go for reconstructs. We want to keep those reconstructs from falling to the next category down and costing more money to fix. So the reconstructs are going to take longer to get to than the overlays. The overlays will be done 15 or 16 years out.”
Stockhoff says that if all things remain equal—if roads are maintained and the city's backlog of repairs is addressed—Reno's road problems eventually will be under control.
“We're hoping we're not going to be in too bad a shape, but it's still going to take a long time to get to the reconstructs—that's the $188 million backlog,” Stockhoff says.
That's quite a task when the yearly budget is less than $8 million.
“We're stopping the bleeding,” Krause says. “We're kind of saying, 'Everything at the bottom, there's nothing we can do about it; just rebuild it. But we can't let any more enter that backlog, because we'll never ever catch up; we'll be chasing our tail forever.'”
There are four categories the city uses to describe repairs and maintenance, according to Good, the city publicist.
— Reconstructs. These are badly damaged streets that are 20-40 years old. They've outlived their design life and have a PCI rating of 40 or below.
— Overlays. These streets have a good base but need work on the surface; they have a PCI rating of 41-55.
— Slurry seals. This involves the application of a thin layer of oil mixed with sand to streets with a PCI rating of 55-85.
— Fog seals. These are slurry seals without the sand. They are applied to streets rated over 85 PCI.
Stockhoff says the road staff spends a lot of its time playing catch-up.
“What's happened in the last couple years is they've started this aggressive maintenance program now to do fogs and slurrys,” Stockhoff says. “It ... keeps these things from falling further in and costing us more money.”
Good said there are four criteria for selecting streets to be repaired: the PCI rating; complaints; project location, size and cost (street repairs are grouped for cost-effective construction); average daily traffic; and special considerations such as utility replacement or other improvements.
Many streets downtown, where tourists can develop a lifetime impression of Reno, fall into the “special consideration” category. That's not a good thing.
“The majority of the downtown area is rated as 'vulnerable to change,' ” the 1995 city road report said, “meaning future construction may involve utility cuts or street redesign that would affect any improvements made now. These areas are avoided as much as possible.”
Road To Recovery
Strategic plans and all their bureaucratic language—fogs, slurrys, reconstructs—might
be fine and dandy on the drawing board, but some residents think all of that
is a bunch of mumbo jumbo.
Those residents say the streets look and feel like a battlefield under fire, and they're tired of paying $40 a year to realign the front ends of their cars.
Tom Lovelace, who responded to an RN&R survey, blames a variety of factors for the condition of Reno's roads.
“The main reasons are weather,” he writes. “We need more repaving, not just piecemeal pothole repair. More money is needed to do the job right in the first place. We need to repave, repave, repave.”
Lovelace's comments illustrate the huge chasm between what city officials say is happening and what the public sees on a day-to-day basis.
Even some city officials concede that the public perception is accurate.
Krause, for instance, says weather is a contributing factor. He says that while there are places in the country that have more extreme weather on an annual basis, there are few that have Reno's wide variance of temperatures—especially in winter.
“Even though the Midwest has more severe winters, what happens is it freezes once and stays frozen over the winter,” he says. “So it goes through one or maybe two freeze-thaw cycles the whole year. We have daily freeze-thaw cycles. We have the big change in temperatures, so every day it's like freeze then thaw, freeze then thaw, and that's what works these streets. It is not uncommon for us to have a 40- to 50-degree spread in day-to-night temperatures.
“Asphalt expands and contracts,” he adds. “You get a few cracks, and you get a freeze-thaw, freeze-thaw, and they start multiplying. They're almost like germs—like cells that are dividing right before your eyes.”
| “We need more repaving, not just piecemeal pothole repair. More money is needed to do the job right in the first place. We need to repave, repave, repave.” |
In some cases, the gap between public perception and the strategic plan is based on superficial aspects of road repair.
Sometimes, the top layer of the pavement surface is bumpy, raveled and uncomfortable to drive on, but the base is good.
According to Stockhoff, even though a street appears bad, the Public Works Department is more concerned with repairing streets that truly are bad—again, it's more about maintaining the good streets until the bad ones can be gotten to.
“That's why it looks like, 'Here is a street that's a piece of garbage, and here's one over here that doesn't look as bad and it gets done and this one sits,' ” he says. “We won't even consider a reconstruct street until it gets to 10. We fully acknowledge those streets are really bad before they get reconstructed.”
City publicist Good say the city's elected officials are committed to improving the roads—over time.
“The council made streets a priority with this aggressive plan,” Good says. “We won't have this kind of problem in another 15 years.”
By then, Jeff Kuklok, the auto mechanic from Tires Unlimited, should be a rich man.
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