An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but Toledo government shuns spending money to maintain essential public infrastructure and passes inconvenience and expense on to its citizens.
Failure to maintain the Collins Park Water Plant resulted in the 2014 interruption of potable water and prompted expensive catchup dollars to update both the Collins Park and Bayview plants. The city did not recognize the failure of an 84-inch sewer culvert under the Bowsher High School football field in 2022 as a precursor to pipe collapses and sink holes along Arlington Avenue this past spring, resulting in raw sewage releases. The bill for emergency repair funding is forthcoming.Â
Road repair is the leading complaint to Engage Toledo. The income earmarked for Toledo roads: gas taxes, licensing fees, overweight truck fines, federal and state matching grants and what can be spared from the Toledo budget, has been meager. The city averaged only 11.7 lane miles per year of road resurfacing from 2015-2020. The mayor’s refrain is that money would be spent on road repair, if there was only a large source of money.
Regrettably, more of the $180 million of the American Recovery Plan Act of 2021 allocated to Toledo was not spent on infrastructure as allowed by the Act. Currently, in the second, four-year tax levy to catch up on neglected repair, Toledo is now averaging 44.8 lane miles per year (2021-2025), but the levies are not solving the problem.
The long-term strategic plan is a relatively simple arithmetic exercise. There are approximately 2,680 lane miles of road. If the useful life of a freshly rebuilt/repaved road, including patching, averages as much as 40 years, the city should be routinely budgeting to repave 2.5 percent of the roads (67 lane miles) annually and be caught up in forty years.
The 114 roads announced for 2025 only represents 42.64 lane miles of road or 1.6 percent of the total lane miles, and it will take about 60 years on average before all the roads are repaired. But don’t count on seeing your residential road being repaired inside 60 years, because the city sometimes prioritizes repair on roads that least require resurfacing.
Maintaining roads makes the roads safer, saves money on tires and car undercarriage repair, especially the most deteriorated roads, and makes Toledo more attractive for businesses and residential neighborhoods. Addressing road repair early also saves government money because road repair costs are rising quicker than other inflationary costs.
