EDMONTON – Edmonton gambled and lost in the war on potholes this year.
A slowly improving road network led transportation officials to believe they could get away with a $41-million drop in funding for arterial road maintenance in the 2012-14 capital budget.
Then spring 2013 arrived.
“Now people can see there’s a problem,” said Bob Boutilier, head of the transportation department. “I don’t think we needed a massive survey to see we had a greater pothole problem than before.”
Potholes develop when water gets into an existing crack in an aging road and freezes. Edmonton’s roads are so rotten that city crews have already filled 57,000 potholes this year, compared with 15,000 at the same time last year.
That marks a setback for the road network. With repairs, Edmonton’s main high-traffic or arterial roads had been slowly improving since 1994.
Every other year, the department rates all arterial roads on a scale of one to 10, taking into account how they look, how they feel when you drive them and the quality of the underlying structure. The roads were an average 5.2 in 1994, and slowly improved to a 6.2 in 2010.
Unfortunately, that convinced the department they could afford to support a lower budget for road repair during budget discussions in 2011, as they struggled to find money to fund other projects with fewer provincial infrastructure grants, said Boutilier.
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The budget went from $87 million in capital budget 2009-11, to $46 million in the 2012-14 budget.
“It was a matter of competing for money,” said Boutilier. With roads rated an average above 6, “we thought great – now we can get through the next two years before we get into the 2015 capital budget.
“Then we got hit with this winter freeze and thaw, which took a real hit to our roadway.”
This spring, as pothole complaints poured in, Coun. Amarjeet Sohi asked the transportation department to find up to $12 million in other areas of their budget to boost their repair program this summer.
This Wednesday, Boutilier will report back to the transportation committee, detailing how they’ll find that money.
On March 20, the department goes to council with a list of locations that could most use a resurfacing – grinding down the asphalt and repaving to give another decade to a rough road.
Potholes have always been a problem in Edmonton; it’s a curse of geography. The soil here is clay-based, which absorbs water and shifts more easily than the gravel found under much of Calgary.
The city’s northern climate means weeks of temperatures hovering around zero. When spring arrives, snow melts and water seeps through cracks in the road. It freezes at night and expands, widening the crack and sometimes popping off the top layer of asphalt.
If a road is in good repair, there are few cracks for the water to seep into. But roads don’t last long. The slowdown on road repair made a big difference fast.
“When you think most arterial roads will only last eight to 12 years between repairs, it doesn’t take long for it to hit,” said Al Cepas, an engineer with road maintenance. “Plus we had a backlog.
“There’s almost $100-million worth of work that should have been done, but wasn’t. It’s really a money issue more than anything else.”
The engineers have two dozen roads on the list for Sohi, said Cepas, all of which need the work now. But $12 million won’t go far. It will only treat 20 kilometres of the city’s roughly 800 kilometres of arterial roads. Department officials will have to pick and choose, avoiding any roads that need utility work soon or those that would cause detour gridlock.
The bigger issue is how to avoid budgeting with fingers crossed, then throwing money at a problem in the future, said Boutilier.
That will likely be the big debate at council. “What is adequate funding so that we’re not going through this up and down?” he said.
There are still bad potholes on residential roads, but council voted several years ago to dedicate a specific tax increase to neighbourhood road renewal. That’s a guarantee all neighbourhoods will be up to standard eventually.
Arterial roads need a similar guarantee, Boutilier said, because relying on provincial grants is too unstable. “There’s a base level of funding that needs to be in place. We should be able to motor through those bad years and have a plan five years out.”
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