Since we are home to the worst roads in the Bay Area, it’s likely there’s a pothole you pass regularly. That one you know just how to maneuver around without ripping into your tire. That one you silently curse when you can’t avoid its unyielding “thud.”
If your preferred pothole sits on a major thoroughfare, there may be hope for relief in the form of a slurry seal or even a complete road reconstruction. But for those on less-traveled roadways, it may be a while before that pothole gets piled over with asphalt.
For decades, Petaluma has been in a losing war with potholes, which today form faster than they can be fixed. Public Works Director Jason Beatty doesn’t mince words when describing the dire straits of our lanes and drives.
“The funding we have isn’t even enough to maintain our current condition,” he said, explaining there’s $2.57 million in the 2021 road repair budget, while the city streets boast more than $100 million in deferred maintenance. He’s hopeful, however, that the extra dollars raised by the recently passed 1-cent sales tax, expected to bring in around $13.5 million annually, might speed up the city’s rate of repairs.
He’ll be asking for additional funding for city streets next month, when the 5-year pavement plan is updated. And while it’s likely Public Works will get the green-light to spend more on our crumbling streets, it may feel like but a speck of asphalt in one cavernous pothole. Even if the council choose to spend all of its sales tax revenue on road repairs (which it won’t), it would still be $6.5 million short of the $20 million a year needed to catch up with all of the required repairs on city streets.
Potholes have been a topic of Petaluma conversation for more than 100 years. The earliest reference in the Argus-Courier archives came in March 1918, when the county supervisors fretted over potholes that formed in Santa Rosa following a heavy rain.
In the 1940s and ‘50s, providing pristine roads became a point of national pride for post-war America. Stories highlighted expedient road projects and newly built infrastructure, like the 1956 opening of Highway 101 that cut Petaluma in two, but kept through traffic from degrading city streets.
“Well thank heaven the trucks are off Main Street,” said Mayor Vincent J. Schoeningh at the highway’s dedication.
By the 1960s and ‘70s, it was clear potholes were becoming a problem, or at least a joke. A 1968 story described Petaluma Hill Road as a “patched quilt, so many times have its potholes been filled and its cracks tarred.” Noted humorist Art Buchwald’s column in 1970 teased that politicians were now buying manufactured potholes to win elections.
“Once they’ve been installed, the voters complain about them, and then the officials arrange for the potholes to be filled in,” Buchwald wrote. “This way the politicians win the undying gratitude of the electorate.”
Petaluma’s fixation with potholes is as deep and varied as the potholes themselves. Based on our current financial realities, it’s a headache we’ll be living with for a while. There’s no silver bullet solution to this problem. While the new revenue from Measure U should speed up the rate of repairs, it seems unlikely to catch up with the city’s decades of deferred maintenance anytime soon.
It’s easy to try and draw comparisons to Larkspur, which until recently, had the worst rated roads in the Bay Area. Then the affluent little Marin County city passed a half-cent sales in 2013, which was later raised to a three-quarter-cent sales tax in 2017, with a goal to repave 25 miles of road in five years, at a total cost of $26 million. They also passed a revenue bond with a 23-year lease, allowing city officials quicker access to the sales tax dollars to get the roadways paved now, albeit with additional debt down the road. Within a few years, they no longer had the worst roads in the Bay.
While undoubtedly an impressive feat of focused government resources, Larkspur has but 3.24 square miles versus Petaluma’s 14.52 square miles. Larkspur is made up of mostly residential and city streets, while Petaluma has rural roads, highway connectors and other complicated transit systems to consider. Larkspur also has a long history of supporting sales tax measures, while Petaluma only recently passed its first successful sales tax, meaning it’s unlikely the city will be coming back hat in hand anytime soon.
So, since they may be with us for a while, go ahead and give that pothole a pet name. Something you can say around the kids, like “Hold on tight, Porky is coming up.”