Two months after Mayor Annise Parker called Houston’s pockmarked streets a “crisis situation” and pledged to clear a mounting pothole repair backlog, the city has reduced open work requests by about 1,000 despite a steep increase in calls for repairs.
The welcome news for Houston drivers tired of dodging pesky potholes is tempered by the fact that crews are still more than two months behind keeping pace with incoming requests. But the city’s response has dramatically improved, Deputy Public Works Director Eric Dargan told a City Council committee Tuesday.
Using increased funding made available last summer but only recently spent, added crews and contractors on the streets along with more hours worked have helped winnow the 3,794 requests for pothole patches in January down to 2,769, Dargan said. The city has also nearly tripled the number of potholes filled during the past two months compared with the same time period in 2014.
Council members largely lauded the improvements Tuesday and commended Dargan for leading a response to what he called a “heightened sense of urgency” around the city’s pothole problem.
“Voters want the pensions fixed and the potholes fixed,” Councilman Jack Christie said. “That is the two greatest things that you could please the citizens with.”
Other changes the department has made since Houston’s pothole problem came to a head in 2014 are largely administrative and, seemingly, long overdue: using a Google maps-based management system to more efficiently map service requests, sorting out duplicate complaints and tracking time spent investigating problems.
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Houston’s increasing pothole problem is driven by a range of factors, but chief among them is under-investment in city streets over the years that have left drivers facing ever bumpier roads, especially in older parts of the city.
But Dargan also attributed the steep rise in calls to media attention. A slew of reports about the lingering pothole problem spurred Parker to call the situation an emergency in early February.
In particular, Parker and the public works department came under fire for having spent only about 20 percent of a $10 million pot of extra funding the city approved last summer specifically to speed up street repairs.
Parker said the city took too long to get contracts in place to complete the work, and she vowed to speed up the process before she leaves office.
As of the end of March, the city had spent more than $7 million of the money allocated for street repair, lining up on-call contractors to supplement city staff.
I haven’t really followed this, but it’s been a thing on Teh Twitters – with hashtags! – so I’m sure you can find some background if you want. Could this have been managed better by the city? I’m sure it could have been. Is this the most important campaign issue of the year? No.
So what is the most important issue of the year? By year I think one means the upcoming Mayor’s race?
Is the lack of solving crimes by police the most important issue?
The pension debt, because the City has not paid it part?
Is it traffic again, we complain about it but can’t do much about it. The best candidate in my opinion in the last 15 years was Peter Brown, but the major players in Houston did not care for him. After Brown was George Grenias, I was disappointed when they found his viewing at Metro, he is/was a person who cares for Houston.
My prediction is that Bill King has a good chance of making the run-off. If he does he will win especially if it is against Turner. That is based on the candidates as of today.
My dos centavos is that pot holes are important to people, and the media should not have been required for the city to provide the basic services that we pay for.
Fixing potholes, timing lights, and any other things the city can do to help motorists is probably the highest and best use of the taxpayer’s money at this point.