There’s a Senate candidate running on a platform to fix Missouri potholes. Are they really that bad?

C.W. Gardner had one experience with a city pothole that he calls “awesome.” The Central West End doorman navigates the city on an electric scooter sporting 10-inch wheels. He was riding the scooter at top speed on a quieter section of Boyle Street. By the time he spotted a void in the tar seam, it was too late for him to skid to a stop. 

“I had to just crouch down and pull the scooter up and hope that I could hop over,” he says of the jump, which no one witnessed. “And, somehow, I did, and I was numb for two minutes because I’m like, ‘I can’t believe I just did that.’”

Frustration with potholes is nothing new for residents in the St. Louis region. In the City of St. Louis, there’s hundreds of unfilled potholes.

Back in 1978, before there were even airbags in cars, residents took to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to complain about the mini-craters dotting the region’s streets. 

“On Woodson Road in Breckenridge Hills, right in front of City Hall, you don’t look out for the potholes, you watch out for the little hunks of pavement that are still standing,” said a north St. Louis County Resident in a Monday edition of the paper. 

Now, potholes take on a life of their own within the region’s culture. There’s even a U.S. Senate candidate, Gardner, centering his campaign policy on them. 

Facing off against the likes of former Governor Eric Greitens and Attorney General Eric Schmitt to be the Republican nominee for Sen. Roy Blunt’s seat, doorman Gardner is framing his campaign around a simple platform: He wants to fill every pothole in America with tax credits from federally legalized marijuana. He calls it the Missourah Plan.

“I was looking for a populist idea for my campaign,” he says. “No one is going to be pro-pothole. I’ve accused my opponents of being pro-pothole and in the back pocket of big-pothole because they haven’t said a word about it.”

Pothole Guys

Before becoming a doorman, Gardener spent 19 years working in the media, mainly as a radio producer for stations like KMOX. During that time, he came to know of a sort of “pothole guy.”

“There’s always some guy at a city council meeting complaining … about potholes,” he says. 

In 2015, Gardner covered a City of St. Louis Ways and Means Committee meeting held outdoors in the Near North Riverfront. There, residents from across the region argued for and against the proposal for a new Rams stadium. He says it felt like a Parks and Recreation episode.

At the meeting, according to Gardner, there was an attendee who said the city doesn’t need a new stadium, and that leaders should rather be focused on filling potholes. 

“I joked about it then,” he says. “I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, pothole guy is here.’” 

But within a short time after the meeting, Gardner says he realized that he, too, is a pothole guy. He wants to see fewer of them around the region. 

Caroline Fan, the president and founder of the Missouri Asian American Youth Foundation, also cares about potholes. Fan had her own run-in with one just the other day. She was driving southbound on Kingshighway between Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Highway 40 when she encountered an obstacle course. 

“There’s three potholes in a row,” she says. “On one side, there’s a giant pothole on the other side and I guarantee you, if you swerve to avoid one or the other, you will hit [it].”

She didn’t immediately realize the damage the pothole caused. She arrived at her destination safely, then later headed out to the car with a group of interns to take a field trip to Cahokia Mounds.

“[We] got to the car, and the tire looked like a melted gummy bear,” she says. 

John Jackson, the owner of Master Auto Repair, says potholes bring his Lindenwood Park shop business. Aside from just popping tires, he says potholes can wear down a vehicle’s suspension.

“You get these vehicles—when they get 10 years old—on a hot day like today, and you hit a good pothole moving 30, 40 miles an hour, ball joints, wheel bearings, tires, they cause lots of damage to all those components,” he says. 

A repair after hitting a pothole cost an average of $600 in 2021 according to an American Automobile Association survey. The organization reported that potholes cost drivers in the United States over $26 billion last year, alone. At Jackson’s shop, a repair job after hitting a pothole can cost up to $1,500. 

Fan says she wants to see money in the City of St. Louis go toward projects like fixing roads and building public transit, rather than other initiatives like demolishing buildings. 

“I’m just frustrated because I feel like a lot of the ARPA monies in our region are going toward demolishing buildings, and they’re supposed to be money for infrastructure,” she says. “And I don’t really see it happening.”

However, there’s still plenty of time—and money. The city recently surveyed residents on how it should spend $249 million in COVID-19 relief funds. Respondents said that they wanted neighborhood transformation addressed, including potholes. Mayor Tishaura Jones told St. Louis on the Air that American Rescue Plan Act funds and money from the bipartisan infrastructure law could be used to keep improving St. Louis’ built environment. 

Taking It to the Streets

In the City of St. Louis, Jackson says roads are at a troubling level of disrepair and are only getting worse. But Kent Flake, the city’s commissioner of streets, says there’s not necessarily more potholes now than in years past. 

Flake reports that there’s 650 potholes that the Street Department knows of in the city. It can fix about 800 of them per month, he says, and sometimes even more. 

Five weeks ago, the city had a backlog of 2,000 unfilled potholes, Flake says. In response, the Street Department—which also cleans streets and manages illegal garbage disposals—shut down its nonessential operations and dedicated all its crews to making progress on the backlog. In just three or four days, Kent says the department filled 1,300 potholes.

In St. Louis County, crews patch around 15,000 potholes within a 12-month period, according to David Wrone, the public information manager for the Department of Transportation and Public Works. He says crews sometimes encounter holes to fix on their own. Other times, they begin with a resident’s complaint.

In St. Louis County, you should call the service request line—314-615-8538—or submit a 311 service request online to complain about a pothole. In the city, you can request that a pothole be fixed through the Citizens Service Bureau. You can make the request through an online form or by calling the bureau at 314-622-4800. 

Flake says he loves the bureau. Before its creation, residents had to report potholes directly to alders or city officials. With the new system, each request gets logged online and officials get alerts when a request becomes overdue. Eventually, every request gets printed out for a road crew to manage.

In the county, crews prioritize fixing potholes on larger streets like Big Bend Road. Every pothole fix requires several moving parts, according to Wrone. 

“It’s not just a matter of pulling up in a pickup truck and throwing some asphalt in the hole and moving on,” Wrone says. “No, you got to have a truck behind the asphalt truck…because you’ve got to temporarily close that portion of the road that you’re working on.”

Before fixing potholes on big streets and alleyways, the City of St. Louis focuses on fixing potholes that damage vehicles first, according to Kent. 

“The first thing we prioritize is whether there was a claim for property damage if someone hit a pothole or are claiming that they destroyed their rim, destroyed their oil bin, destroyed something in their vehicle,” Flake says. “Those obviously become priority number one.”

Despite some roadways dating back over 100 years, Flake says their age does not attract more issues. 

“I almost prefer to have a roadway base of cobble or brick…,” he says. “I’m pretty sure they built it right, because those old things are very sturdy.”

The city fills nearly every pothole with an asphalt pour. The metal plates covering segments of roads are almost never used to fix potholes in the city, Flake says. 

Gardner says the city should take the time to repave entire sections of road at some point, instead of just filling potholes. But larger repairs and repavement jobs require approval from the Board of Aldermen. Elsewhere, Flake says it’s not typical that elected councils need to give approval for larger road repairs and resurfacing. 

Every spring, Flake meets with each alderperson to get major road repairs approved. He says some of them are calling for more autonomy in the Street Department—that it should control its own budget and which roads to resurface. Other alders, he says, think they know the roads and the ones that need to be fixed in their wards better than the Street Department. His opinion lies between the two viewpoints. 

“I would like to see where we’ve actually put together, ‘These are the 20 blocks we want to pave,’” Flake says. “And, yes, then the aldermen can say, ‘Well, I don’t want to do these three blocks out of those 20, but I’d like to add these other three.’ So I think there’s some give and take that could be there.”

Both the city and county use residents’ input to help them fix the roads. Wrone says his department is both proactive and reactive in its approach to maintaining the roads.

“I just want to emphasize the fact that we’ve got people out on a regular basis, filling potholes, so that’s the proactive,” he says. “Then the reactive is, you see a pothole and you call it in to us, and then we’ll respond to that.”

But some residents take measures into their own hands. 

Gardner has repaired a pothole himself. The day before shooting a campaign video, he picked out three potholes on a less-busy stretch of Newstead Avenue—he didn’t want cars rolling through during filming. During the ad, he says, “Unlike my U.S. Senate opponents, I like to fix problems, not create them.”