Mayor, Street Director Outline Plan to Battle Potholes

Safety and drivability of streets is paramount concern

Marlene Feist, City of Spokane Public Works & Utilities, (509) 625-6505

Friday, February 24, 2017 at 12:13 p.m.

Spokane Mayor David Condon, Public Works Director Scott Simmons, and new Street Director Gary Kaesemeyer today laid out a plan to address the bumper crop of weather-related potholes in the City of Spokane.

“We are working to improve the safety and drivability of our streets immediately, and then move to more permanent repairs as weather conditions improve and better repair materials are available,” says Mayor Condon.

“The potholes we are experiencing are a direct result of the weather conditions we have seen throughout the Northwest—record precipitation, severe freezing, and a series of freeze-thaw cycles,” Kaesemeyer says. “We must improve driving conditions for our citizens and visitors.”

The plan includes a series of immediate actions that will improve driving conditions throughout the City. Here’s what’s happening:

  • Additional two-person teams from the City’s Water and Wastewater departments are assisting Street crews with pothole repairs.
  • The Street Department is testing several additional pothole filling materials to determine if those materials can provide longer-lasting repairs on the busiest arterials. Crews are testing a concrete product and a polymer-based product used for bridge deck repair and will look at other options as well. These products require the area around a repair to be closed to traffic for several hours for curing.
  • The City has worked with Inland Asphalt to open a local asphalt plant early so crews have access to hot-mix asphalt, which provides a superior repair over the cold-mix asphalt crews have been using. That plant is expected to open the week of March 6.
  • Street crews have arranged to test a new piece of equipment next week for repairing potholes that allows for greater compaction and potentially a longer-lasting repair.

Beyond these immediate steps, the Street Department will identify sections of arterial streets with multiple potholes or more significant deterioration that need work on the street base and a larger patch. That work will be prioritized based on the extent of the damage and where those sections are located. Some of these repairs will need to wait until the ground has dried out. Arterial streets with significant deterioration that may pose a hazard for drivers will be evaluated for selected closures until more permanent repairs can be made.

The Street Department also will evaluate its planned grind and overlay repair schedule for the summer to see if some projects need to be reprioritized based on the winter damage.

This plan supplements the work that Street Department already has been doing to address potholes. Street crews have been working to repair potholes as much as possible over the last couple of weeks. Crews remain on winter scheduling through March 15 so employees have been working on pothole repairs up to 20 hours a day on both day and night shifts.

Through Feb. 23, Street crews had filled 1,291 potholes, more than a third of the number that the department filled in all of 2016 and nearly 400 more since last week.

Citizens also can do their part to help. If citizens see a pothole that needs to be filled, they should call the City at 3-1-1 to report it. They are asked to include as much information as possible on the location of the problem and its approximate size. The City will fill larger potholes on arterials within 48 hours of reporting.

The long-term solution to the problem of potholes is the City’s ongoing work to reconstruct streets each summer. Improved road beds and surfaces with fewer cracks to let in water are far less susceptible to potholes.

In 2017, the City has planned its largest construction season ever. While projects to reduce overflows from combined sewers into the river dominate this year’s work, this construction season also will include projects to rebuild East Sprague Avenue from Helena to Stone and 37th Avenue from Freya to Regal, the construction of Barnes Road and the extension of MLK Way, and streetscape improvements on Division Street between Spokane Falls and I-90.