Road fund shortage leads residents to patch their city's potholes

By Tom Perkins, special to

HAMTRAMCK, MI - Even in a state known for its poor and crumbling roads, those in Hamtramck stand out as exceptionally bad.

The pothole patch crews that mark Michigan's seasonal shift from winter to spring only recently arrived, and there likely won't be any money to pay for maintenance projects along the city's residential roadways.

That has left a grid of pothole-pocked streets and frustrated motorists wondering when they won't be forced to navigate crumbling and dangerous roads.

While the city began addressing the wider, priority fire routes two weeks ago, help for the smaller, one-way side streets arrived Saturday morning when a group of six residents purchased 900 pounds of cold pack and spent the morning filling potholes along Lumpkin Street.

The project's success and relative simplicity led to the launching of a GoFundMe campaign to raise $5,000 with which the group plans to buy enough supplies to address another 120 residential blocks - a sizeable portion of the city's potholes. All labor is donated.

Already the campaign raised $400 and plans are in the works to fill more potholes next weekend.

Jon Weier, one of the organizers, said the decision to spend a hot Saturday patching a road came out of a conversation over beers with a few friends on Thursday night. It turned out someone they knew could get a deal on cold patch, so Weier and his friends gathered materials on Friday and went to work Saturday morning.

"Potholes are a constant thing you face everyday here. The decision was spur of the moment from one those conversations when you're hanging out: 'When are they going to pave the roads? Why couldn't we just do this?'" Weier said. "The reality is there's no money in the city to do it, and it just isn't going to get done, so what's the difference? Let's do it."

Doing it involved Weier and two others spending $150 to purchase the cold pack, loading it into a truck and hauling it to Hamtramck. From there, the process is simple - the cold pack just needs to be poured into the potholes and packed in with tampers.

That took the crew of six around an hour and a half to finish most of the "bombed out" block of Lumpkin between Caniff and Casmere streets, Weier said.

Hamtramck Mayor Karen Majewski praised the group and called the project "so distinctly Hamtramck, so endearingly Hamtramck."

"It just speaks to me about the level of commitment to and affection for Hamtramck that residents here have," she said. "There's such a strong sense of community spirit and a feeling that we're all in it together. People here are willing to step up and do what they can to make the city work.

"I've never seen that any other place, and I've been all over and lived all over, but I've never seen anything else like it."

The need for resident participation in road repair stems from Hamtramck's financial troubles over recent decades, during which the city saw two stretches of receivership, including one that ended in December.

Though the emergency financial manager is gone, there's no extra money for Hamtramck's roads beyond its allotment of Act 51 funds, which is gas tax money the state disburses to local municipalities, and there's only enough in that pot to address fire routes.

The situation was further complicated by Hamtramck's attempt to "piggyback" on another municipality's roadwork contract. Majewski said the state's Receivership Transition Advisory Board that continues monitoring the city's operation informed it that the move wasn't legal after plans were already in the works.

That forced Hamtramck to seek bids on its own, delaying patch projects by at least a month.

All of Michigan deals with road funding problems to some degree. The state ranks 50th in per capita spending on roadways and its roads are among the country's worst, according to a recent Federal Highway Administration study. Still, in May, state voters overwhelmingly rejected Gov. Rick Snyder's proposal to raise the state's sales taxes to fund road repairs, and the Legislature has yet to agree on an alternative plan.

The most recent idea floated calls for an increase to the corporate tax rate, though business groups labeled that idea "dangerous," and it wouldn't be in front of voters until November 2016, if it makes it at all.

Majewski noted this isn't the first time Hamtramck residents filled potholes, though she says this effort appears much more organized. During the mid-1990s the city faced a similar financial situation and residents residing on different blocks filled potholes on their own streets, she said.

In May, Hamtramck artist Paige Breithart filled around 40 potholes with dirt and flowers in an effort to draw attention to the issue.

Weier stressed that he isn't trying to make a statement and his motivation isn't political, rather he simply wants to get the work done.

"Look, I don't have opinions. We just do stuff," he said.

Jason Cockram, who also organized the effort, saw it a little differently. He said he's "enraged" that tax-paying residents are forced to take care of projects their tax dollars should have funded. But he added, "You can't complain about something unless you're willing to do something about it."

"I love Hamtramck, and there are things that need to be done that aren't being done by the proper people, so if no one is going to do it, we should," Cockram said. "We have the ability, and it's not a difficult thing. We proved that Saturday. All you have to do is be motivated."