City to fix damage during a `pothole blitz'
Crews to tackle street damage caused by storms
OAKLAND >> After yet another atmospheric river storm swamped the Bay Area last week, the streets of Oakland were left resembling chocolate lava cake, with browned-rainwater puddles filling the edges of potholes expanding on nearly every other turn.
In a city with a pothole problem so notorious that it once led to a vigilante repair movement, city leaders are intent on finding a solution, even a short-term one.
Drawing a page from her predecessors' playbooks, Mayor Sheng Thao announced this week a “pothole blitz” that will enlist the city's road maintenance crews to take an all-handson-deck approach to repairing potholes and other minor road ailments.
The program, set to begin when the streets dry out after the latest round of wet weather, will continue until May 1, when the city will assess its progress.
Crews will be directed to prioritize streets in the East Oakland flatlands that have been in disrepair for disproportionately longer than other parts of town, in line with city leaders' vow to work equitably for disadvantaged residents.
“I've heard from so many residents that they are frustrated with the conditions of our roads. Potholes seem worse, and they are taking longer to fill,” the mayor said in a tweet. “The good news is that Oakland has a plan for that.”
The “pothole blitz” is a common short-term initiative to combat storm weather damage. Similar initiatives — bearing the same name — were ordered in the past decade by former Mayors Libby Schaaf and Jean Quan.
So far, though, the efforts of Oakland's leaders have scarcely helped improve the city's reputation of being riddled with potholes that threaten significant damage to vehicles and their tires.
And the recent winter storms have only made things worse: when stormwater seeps into cracks on a roadway, it is known to erode the asphalt and deepen its crevices.
The trying weather season has left transportation officials with the task of sorting through a largerthan-usual backlog of 311 reports — the phone number given to residents to request pothole repairs, among a number of other services.
“We're at the mercy of the weather,” said Fred Kelley, the director of Oakland's transportation department. “While the rains are great, given we've been in a drought for what feels like forever, it does delay our ability to begin initiatives like the pothole blitz in earnest.”
Fixing a pothole is far less expensive than entirely repaving a street. The city hires third-party contractors to focus on main roads like Telegraph Avenue or International Boulevard, leaving the in-house crews to focus on residential side streets.
The transportation department is understaffed, with Kelley noting a 25% to 30% vacancy rate among workers that extends to road maintenance crews.
“That's one of our biggest challenges,” said Councilmember Nikki Fortunato Bas, whose district includes part of the East Oakland flatlands where the pothole problem is the worst. “There is going to be a much more united focus between the mayor and the council to hire more people who can address these minor road repairs.”
A typical pothole repair is, by nature, a short-term fix, involving pre-mixed asphalt — called cold patches — that are sturdy enough to keep the road level. But the material doesn't hold up well against heavy vehicle traffic or strong rains, leaving transit repair crews with a whack-a-mole problem whenever a storm hits.
Voters in the last November election approved Measure U, an infrastructure bond paid with property tax revenue. On an FAQ page, the city promises that the bond will “pave a minimum of 40 miles of streets per year.”
Bas, who authored the measure, noted that its spiritual predecessor, Measure KK, provided the first revenue funding in recent memory dedicated to street repairs. The FAQ page declares that Measure KK upped Oakland's yearly street-paving average to 27 miles per year, a 200% increase from before.
Still, annoyance toward potholes among the public has led to some unusual phenomena. In 2019, a civilian group called the Pothole Vigilantes drew national fanfare and raised nearly $14,000 after its leaders promised to take repairing the roads into their own hands.
The Pothole Vigilantes group — which once received a shoutout from then-Mayor Schaaf — hasn't been heard from publicly in years, and its social media pages stopped producing updates by the end of the summer that it formed.
Attempts to reach the group for an interview were unsuccessful. It's unclear how many potholes its members ended up filling.
Social media is still filled with anecdotal reports of residents who submitted a 311 report for city services and never heard back. Kelley could not provide a ballpark figure of how many reports are in the transportation department's backlog, but said he would urge residents to exercise patience with a shorthanded city department.
“If I lived on a particular street and put in a 311 request, I would want to see someone out there within the next day or two,” Kelley said. “But that's not realistic when 311 calls are coming in throughout the city. It's impossible — I don't even care if you're fully staffed — to address those all at once.”