Throughout the year, the city of Lubbock tracks the number of road repair requests submitted by the community, and how many of them the city was able to fix.
During the city’s 2018 fiscal year (October through the following September), the Public Works Department received 980 requests from the citizens. The city made 2,937 repairs, meaning in addition to the requests, they attended to other problems they may have found along the way, in addition to requests made by city employees.
To break it down in terms of the calendar year, from January to November of 2018, the city fixed 3,818 potholes (as to include October and November of this year).
“Believe it or not, about 40% of those come from the public. The remainder 60% that we get noticed, actually come from city employees, as our police, our codes enforcement, water department guys, they travel around the roads a lot,” said Wood Franklin, the division director of Public Works.
A complaint many residents in the city had included the problem dirt roads caused for them.
“Cars, they get stuck in the road,” said Aurelia Portillo, a city resident whose home is on a dirt road. Portillo complained that the garbage trucks often get stuck, and her kids have to wait near pools of water and mud for the bus when it rains.
“I’ve made many calls to the city. They have done nothing,” she said.
Public Works said, for the second year in a row, city council allocated $400,000 specifically toward paving those roads.
“As far as the dirt roads getting paved into new roads, we are going to do as much as we can with the funding that is appropriated by council,” said Franklin. “We prioritize those by number of houses on the road, the traffic on it, and where does it connect to pavement, if its on a school bus route.”
However, he said that money does not cover paving a lot of roads, so it will take time.
Meanwhile, if other road complaints a resident called in were not addressed, he said it may have to do with budgetary constraints or poor weather conditions.
“When a customer calls or a citizen calls in a pothole, it’s in our goal to get that addressed in 48 hours. It doesn’t mean we can repair it because if that pothole is reported in a time when it’s wet out there, we can’t make repairs. But we can make the pothole location safe,” said Franklin.
To file a road request, Franklin said give the city a call at 311. A lot of the times, they may not know of the problem, and rely on citizen’s calls.
