“This place leaks like a sieve,” Roman said. If not, it’ll drip onto the carpet in the division captain’s office. Water soon will stream from the station’s roof at the Police Department’s City Heights station, and Roman needs the tarp to funnel rain into a 36-gallon trashcan.
The roof hasn’t been replaced, even though the city has the money to do it.īefore the rain comes, San Diego police officer Luis Roman takes out a makeshift plastic tarp. If they can’t get it right, the parts of the city that residents touch and feel every day will continue to crumble faster than they can be fixed.Īt the police department’s City Heights station, a leaky roof has caused water damage throughout the building. So far, San Diego’s leaders have overpromised and under-delivered.
#Model broken roads how to
The city still has to figure out how to spend it. It takes more than money to fix San Diego. “We’re committed to fixing the problem.”Īfter decades of decay, there’s money to spend and the promise of much more to come.īut the lumbering pace of repairs reveals a problem rarely discussed while the potholes and cracks grew. “We know it’s a serious problem,” said Tony Heinrichs, head of the city’s public works department. They have plans to borrow $500 million more for lagging repairs. They say they’ve solved their bureaucratic difficulties and are ready to take on even more work. Now, the city says, they’ll all be finished by next summer.Ĭity officials say they were unprepared to spend the money and a disorganized and inefficient bureaucracy made initial delays worse. City officials promised to repave it and 100 more miles of broken roads by this summer. The almost mile-long stretch of Picador that Vigil drives was supposed to be smooth by now. Some repairs remain more than a year away. By mid-August, one-third of the loan still hadn’t been committed to construction projects. That’s why they borrowed $100 million in March 2009 to begin repaving, repairing and replacing the worst of the worst.īut more than two years later, the city has spent just $45.3 million. Mayor Jerry Sanders and other city leaders know it’s a problem. A national transportation group ranked the region’s roads the eighth worst in the country. So are San Diego’s sidewalks, storm drains and city buildings. Local roads are deteriorating faster than they can be fixed.
She throws up her hands a lot when she talks about Picador. Vigil has complained about the street to the city. Houses give way to a middle school, then a strip mall and gas station before the road leads into State Route 905. “It’s depressing,” Vigil said, standing along the boulevard on a recent afternoon.Īs she talks, cars swish by. About every two weeks, Vigil said, the patched potholes in front of the Border View YMCA erode and leave bumps instead. Deep cracks, uneven asphalt and a two-foot-wide pothole jolt her along the way. Picador Boulevard’s decline has become part of Genevieve Vigil’s life.Įvery weekday morning she drives the Otay Mesa road to drop off her 4-year-old son, Dominic, at daycare and then continues on Picador to go to work. For San Diego's Broken Roads, Broken Promises Too | Voice of San Diego Close
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