A Jarring Reality Spokane Streets Face $99 Million Repair Backlog With No Plan To Get Going

Three years ago, the city used a quick fix to buy time for some of Spokane’s sorriest streets.

For many of those streets, time is up.

A drive down Northwest Boulevard near Maple Street finds a thin layer of newer asphalt peeling away to reveal the faded, pitted road below. Parallel grooves grab tires. Cracks in the pavement - known to traffic engineers as “crocodiling” - give way to gaping holes that jar drivers.

A $99 million backlog of repairs plagues Spokane’s 826 miles of streets. That’s real maintenance - a regular schedule of re-surfacing roads as opposed to temporary fixes such as thin overlays and pothole patching.

With no plan in place to deal with the backlog, city officials have turned to residents for ideas in hopes of putting a road bond proposal on the ballot sometime this fall.

A citizen committee that spent months studying the street problem has developed a survey aimed at gauging public sentiment on the growing road crisis. The survey has eight questions, including one that asks drivers to rate the problem on a scale of one to five, and another that asks them what they’d be willing to spend each month to fix the streets.

Voters twice rejected taxes aimed at mending the streets. In 1996, voters defeated a $37.3 million street bond. They did the same thing a year later with a proposal to increase the gas tax by 2.3 cents a gallon.

City officials are hopeful the surveys - combined with a series of public meetings aimed at explaining the street problem - will help propel a future bond measure to victory.

While the survey results won’t be scientific, they will give officials “a better grasp of the options … and help find a proposal that is more acceptable to the community,” said Councilwoman Phyllis Holmes.

Roger Flint, assistant city manager for operations, said he hopes the surveys help answer the question that’s dogged officials for years: “How do we package this so that it’s palatable to the public, so they understand the need?”

Nearly 10,000 surveys have been dispersed throughout Spokane. Stacks were left at community and senior centers, libraries and police substations. Others were sent to members of neighborhood councils and the Economic Development Council.

The survey also is available online, at www.spokanecity.org.

Members of the citizens committee - an off-shoot of Spokane’s community assembly - plan to tally the survey results. After that, they’ll hold meetings in April and May to talk with residents about prioritizing repairs and funding options.

Committee members also hope to help people better understand how the street situation got so bad, and how little money is available to fix the problem.

In the early 1980s, police and fire spending began gobbling bigger chunks of the city budget. That, combined with fewer state and federal dollars for maintenance and a city decision to spend more money on building streets than on repairing them, resulted in a seriously decrepit street system.

A flurry of construction in the past three years - both quick fixes and long-term repairs - left some voters thinking the city solved the problem, said Al French, a committee member.

Those projects were largely growth-related, and the glut of work was partly due to delays from past years. No new money pot materialized.

“Some people very clearly think that was the fix, but unfortunately it’s not,” French said. “So how do we come back and institute something long-lasting?”

If voters seem amenable to a bond, city officials likely would consider doing $10 million to $20 million worth of work over a two-year period, Flint said. He added the city can only tolerate so many streets torn apart at one time.

Even if $100 million miraculously appeared to get all the streets in good shape, the problem of ongoing repair looms, Flint said. “We have a shortfall of about $3.5 million annually.”

The citizens committee plans to report back to the council in June with options.