Rough Roads City Drivers Jolt Along Trails Of Neglect Street Maintenance Delayed For Years And Years And …

For skull-rattling jolts and nerve-jangling thrills, don’t bother with a roller coaster ride that’s over in minutes. Take a drive on Spokane’s main streets.

Rattle down Monroe Street near Broadway, where bricks peek from beneath crumbling asphalt, sending front tires in a dance across the pavement. Go a little farther south and cars ignore their drivers as they bounce across Monroe’s washboard ripples between Third and Seventh avenues.

Potholes that lurk along Grand Boulevard like blacktop booby traps splatter coffee on white shirts and dash lipstick across rosy cheeks. Innocent-looking cracks along northbound Maple Street lead to treacherous gaps that swallow tires and smash oil pans.

Spokane streets are a running gag, with everyone from radio disc jockeys to city officials joking about their sorry state. Between chuckles about chuck holes, nearly everyone who travels the rotting roads wonders the same thing:

How did they get so bad?

The answer is simple: The city delayed their maintenance for years. And years.

For the past decade the city hasn’t even bothered with one of the most basic road maintenance techniques: sealing hairline cracks before they give birth to potholes.

“There’s been a lack of ongoing, programmed maintenance .. that’s caused the streets to become what they are,” said City Manager Bill Pupo.

The trail of neglect can be traced back nearly 15 years. It winds through a stagnant economy, shrinking state and federal dollars, new money pots that never materialized, voter rejection and a decision to spend available money on new roads instead of on maintenance and repairs.

As concerns about gangs and drugs grew, a push to spend more on police made paying for street upkeep even more difficult. Ignoring roads was easy for elected officials when people were more concerned about drive-by shootings.

“There was constant pressure to find more money for police and fire,” said former City Manager Terry Novak, who left the city in 1991.

“I can’t remember why we let the streets go like we did,” said former Mayor Sheri Barnard. “All of a sudden there was this fear that came … and we had to hire more police.”

Street crews don’t flash red lights or blare sirens when rushing to the scene of a pothole.

The high visibility of police and fire issues holds the public’s - and elected officials’ - attention, said Bill Genoway, a former accountant for the street department who now works in construction services. Streets don’t grab the spotlight until they’re riddled with holes. Like now.

A $50 million hole

Preserving streets requires a two-pronged approach:

The most heavily traveled roads should be resurfaced every 10 years, residential streets every 20 years. Resurfacing requires grinding off at least an inch of old pavement to make way for new.

Between resurfacings, cracks should be sealed and potholes patched.

“Since the mid-‘80s, we haven’t had anything resembling a resurfacing program,” Williams said. Voters did approve a $15 million street bond in 1987 to repave 141 miles of roads, but they were mostly residential.

That means maintenance dollars now are being spent patching streets that need resurfacing if not complete rebuilding, he said.

Ideally, that money should be spent keeping roads that are in relatively good shape free of small cracks and isolated potholes.

“We’re chasing our tails,” Williams said.

It would take at least $50 million to resurface and rebuild more than 65 miles of streets that now need major work. While that’s just 8 percent of the city’s total of 826 paved miles, the worst streets are some of the city’s busiest.

Once the city fixes the backlog, it needs about $6 million more each year for a resurfacing program that keeps the roads in good condition.

The money just isn’t there.

The city’s transportation department takes care of basic road maintenance such as plowing, pothole filling and patching. Most of the dollars for that come from the city’s general fund. Smaller amounts come from state gas tax and parking meter revenues.

Major road projects such as resurfacing and new construction are paid for out of the “arterial street fund,” now made up solely of federal grants and state gas tax revenue.

The city hasn’t spent general fund dollars on major road projects since the late 1970s.

Cops, not streets

Problems maintaining streets started when a flat economy left most city departments struggling for money from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, Pupo said.

Several departments laid off employees. The street department, which at the time dealt strictly with road maintenance, dropped from 86 employees in 1973 to 65 in 1981. Entire road crews were cut, but better equipment that required fewer workers helped offset the loss.

The department never regained its old staffing. Just 2.5 positions were added from 1981 to 1995, when the street department merged with traffic engineering to become the transportation department.

The scene was different for police and fire departments.

Police staffing jumped from 277 to 388 full-time employees from 1973 to 1997. Fire department staffing went from 301 to 328 in the same period.

“We were confronted with a new challenge of gangs and crack cocaine violence. There was a great demand that we meet that,” said Spokane Police Chief Terry Mangan, adding that public safety remains the “primary purpose of government at any level.”

Lucrative federal grants encouraged Spokane to hire more police officers. The federal money was given to cities and counties that agreed to match the grants with local dollars. Spokane officials lunged at the opportunity, even though they were committing to eventually pay the full tab for the officers when the federal grants expired.

“The federal government put emphasis on hiring police officers,” Pupo said. “We took advantage of those grants.”

Ignoring the basics

Irv Reed said he immediately sounded an alarm about the long-term effects of street neglect when he joined the city in 1980. Cutting back on routine maintenance and falling behind on resurfacing foreshadowed a street catastrophe, said the former director of planning and engineering services who retired last year.

Reed repeatedly asked the City Council to set aside $1.5 million for an annual resurfacing program. “They told me to go ahead and put it in the … program,” he said. “But the dollars just weren’t there when budget time rolled around.”

The city’s general-fund spending on streets fell between 1985 and 1988, from $2.1 million to $1.7 million.

In 1987, more budget cuts forced the street department to do away with its crack-sealing crew. The crew filled cracks so water couldn’t get beneath the pavement, freeze and create “frost heaves” that shatter asphalt.

“It’s something basic that’s got to be done,” said Transportation Director Bruce Steele. After 10 years without it, Steele’s department got money for a new crack-sealing crew in this year’s budget when the council boosted street spending by $200,000.

“Crack sealing protects streets,” said Gerry Shrope, the city’s capital programs engineer. “If you don’t do it, streets deteriorate at a rapid rate.”

Ironically, voters approved a $15 million street resurfacing bond in 1987 - the same year the city stopped sealing cracks. The bond eventually paid to repave 141 miles of mostly residential roads.

The money was both blessing and curse, Reed said. At the time, most arterial streets looked better than residential ones. So when Reed asked City Council members for still more money to repave busier roads, “They said, ‘You just got $15 million to fix the streets. Don’t come begging to me.”’

From bad to worse

Police and fire continued to woo dollars away from other city departments in the early 1990s.

Genoway recalls a budget meeting where officials asked the street department to cut its snowplow spending to get more money for cops. He asked how police would respond to emergencies if they got stuck in snowy roads. The dollars stayed put.

The city negotiated with the firefighters union to add a fourth platoon of 20 firefighters in 1992.

The emphasis on police and fire wasn’t the only roadblock to saving the streets.

Tougher air quality laws took money away from maintenance. State and federal dollars started slipping. Promising new revenue sources vanished. Prices went up but road money didn’t.

Responding to tougher federal clean-air laws in 1990, the city moved money from routine maintenance to street sweeping.

“We didn’t get more money,” Reed said. “So the patching and pothole filling went down, sweeping went up.”

In 1991, county commissioners adopted a motor vehicle tax aimed at preserving county and city streets, but the city never got a chance to share the wealth. Faced with overwhelming opposition, commissioners repealed the tax before the first bill was collected.

Also in 1991, the federal Intermodal Surface Transportation Act, known as ISTEA, changed the way cities and counties get federal money for streets.

For years, Spokane received a no-strings-attached lump sum of $700,000 to $800,000 a year, said projects engineer Shrope. Much of that went to a limited resurfacing program.

The ISTEA program forced cities and counties to compete regionally for dollars aimed at everything from bridge repairs to safety projects. The nine-member Spokane Regional Transportation Council, composed of elected officials from throughout the county, divvies up the federal allotment.

Reed said he focused his requests on improving roads or building new ones because “preservation was not a high priority in ISTEA.”

Glenn Miles, manager for the transportation council, said resurfacing projects can be competitive if that’s a high priority for the region. City leaders chose to emphasize new construction when asking for money, Miles said.

“It’s a matter of where you prioritize the use of funds,” he said. “Trying to deal with growth and deferring the maintenance has come back to haunt us.”

In 1993, voters rejected a proposed 2.3-cents-per-gallon local gas tax increase that would have gone to repave and sweep streets in the city and county.

In 1995, the state Supreme Court struck down Seattle’s street utility tax, which was tacked on to monthly bills. Reed had counted on using the same kind of tax to rescue Spokane’s roads. The court’s ruling came just two days before he planned to plead his case for the tax to the City Council.

A year later, voters turned down a $37.3 million bond issue to repave about 46 miles of arterial streets and four miles of residential streets.

The bad news only gets worse.

The state gas tax - which the city uses for routine maintenance and to match federal dollars for larger projects - has failed to keep pace with inflation. And, fuel-efficient cars have reduced gasoline consumption. The city gained only $40,000 in gas tax from 1991 to 1996, from $2.96 million to $3 million annually.

Turning things around

City officials had high hopes for this year’s legislative session, but additional money for streets didn’t make the cut. Voters at best are iffy about tax increases.

While dollars diminish or never appear, traffic on city streets gets heavier and inflation drives the cost of repairs even higher. Mix in two terrible winters, and the result is what Transportation Director Steele calls the worst streets in Spokane’s history.

“We’ve got to turn this around,” he said.

It’s only May, and Spokane already has surpassed its previous record for potholes. As of last week, 2,987 potholes had been reported, topping last year’s total of 2,649.

Some officials think it might be time to reorganize priorities and squeeze at least a little more money from the city’s existing budget for road upkeep.

“We’ve put a major, major investment into public safety,” Pupo said. “Now, we need to start re-emphasizing … maintenance.”

“There was a time in this community when its primary concern was public safety, so public safety dollars became a thrust,” said Councilwoman Roberta Greene. “I don’t think that concern is so overriding in people’s thoughts.

“The people in Spokane are ready for us to do something for the streets.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 4 Graphics: 1997 transportation budget spending; Holding the streets together; Shifting dollars; Tracking the city’s employment

MEMO: These 2 sidebars appeared with the story:

1. ROUGH ROADS Today: Spokane’s crumbling thoroughfares have been neglected for years. Monday: Some communities are rethinking the cheapest-is-best approach to roads. Tuesday: Higher taxes and budget cuts are likely needed to fix Spokane’s streets, but city officials aren’t rushing ahead on either front.

2. MILEPOSTS OF NEGLECT 1973-1981: City street department loses employees to budget cuts. 1987: Street department eliminates its crew that seals cracks in roads, a basic procedure to prevent potholes. 1988-present: Concerns about rising crime and gangs cause city officials to spend more money on police - sometimes at the expense of other services. 1990: Stricter clean-air standards force city to shift some money from street maintenance to street sweeping to keep dust down. 1991: County commissioners adopt motor vehicle license tax for street repairs, but repeal it before the first bill is collected because of public outcry. 1991: Federal government stops giving lump sums to local governments for streets, instead tying the money to specific projects. The result: less money for resurfacing. 1993: Voters countywide reject a proposed 2.3-cent-per-gallon local gas tax aimed at street resurfacing and sweeping in the city and county. 1995: State Supreme Court strikes down Seattle’s street utility tax, which local officials hoped to copy for streets here. 1996: City voters reject proposed $37.3 million road bond. 1997: Legislature backs away from proposed gas tax increase, a portion of which would have gone to local governments for streets.