Waianae waits for city to repave its pothole-patched roads

Like many Oahu roads, Mill Street in Waianae is falling apart. Its cracks and potholes take their toll on passing vehicles. Its degradation follows decades of neglect in an area where the city has not kept pace with the regular repaving that’s needed.

Lately, city Department of Facility Maintenance road crews have been busy there with a faster and cheaper temporary fix: pothole patches.

“All you see is patches,” Mill Street resident Kalani Pahinui said recently, surveying the patchwork of bumpy asphalt outside his home. “You go to other places (on Oahu), it’s not like this.”

Experts consider patching potholes to be a temporary repair, to be done after a road has failed and needs repaving.

The city’s Waianae district, which includes most of Oahu’s Leeward Coast, saw the second-largest number of pothole repairs in 2015, at more than 10,500, city data show. (The Honolulu district, which includes the urban core, saw the most. It had more than 25,500 such repairs, representing about half of all the island’s pothole fixes last year.)

At the same time, the city has not repaved any Leeward Coast streets in the first three years of its campaign to resurface the island’s worst roads. Officials overseeing the effort say they will finally start there in the coming weeks.

By contrast, almost all of Kailua’s city roads were repaved in the first three years, data from the city Department of Design and Construction show. That district, which also includes Waimanalo, saw 991 pothole patches in 2015, according to city reports. It’s not clear how many miles of road are in each district; city officials said they didn’t have that breakdown.

City maintenance leaders say they prioritize which roads to repave based on 2012 grades under what’s known as the “pavement condition index.” The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers developed the PCI, which rates road conditions on a scale of 1 to 100, with 100 as the best.

Sometimes the city postpones fixing terrible roads because utility work is scheduled there later. However, no such work is scheduled in the Leeward areas, city officials say. The conditions simply weren’t as bad as elsewhere, they added.

City officials did not have average PCI scores for the island’s eight facility districts, but they did provide that information for the island’s nine City Council districts. Councilwoman Kymberly Pine’s district, which includes the Leeward Coast, had the third-best average PCI score. Councilman Ikaika Anderson’s district, which includes Kailua, ranked fifth.

Councilman Brandon Elefante’s Pearl City district had the best average PCI score, indicating many roads there should have been low on the repaving priority list. However, DDC data show most of those roads have already been repaved.

Mayor Kirk Caldwell and other city officials said politics has nothing to do with repaving — although Caldwell added that it was a factor for previous administrations.

“Frank Fasi, when he was mayor, particularly (when) it got close to election, he would go pave major thoroughfares — King Street, wherever — and where his supporters were. He had to ignore areas that he had low voter support,” Caldwell said in a recent interview.

By contrast, Caldwell told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, he has kept the current repaving schedule at arm’s length. “I don’t think I’ve once said, ‘Go pave a road.’

“Although I’m starting to tell you you’ve got to fix Alakea (Street), because it sucks,” he quipped to Department of Facilities Maintenance Director Ross Sasamura.

Sasamura said new development in Kailua might have inflated the average for that district, but many roads there were in dire need of repaving. Also, repaving crews often resurface nearby roads, even if they’re not as torn up, for efficiency’s sake, officials say.

In the meantime Pahinui, a 49-year-old lifelong Waianae resident, and his neighbors will wait their turn for resurfacing.

“It doesn’t surprise me a bit. It’s always been as you see it,” he said of the repaving schedule and the roads. “I guess down here we’ve got to take care of our own.”