Indy’s streets are so bad, making them ‘fair’ would take 10 times the current budget

Indianapolis’ decaying, pothole-ridden roads are on the cusp of a catastrophic collapse unless hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to fix them quickly.

An internal city analysis paints a bleak picture of future road conditions, calling the amount of work and money needed to repair 8,100 miles of streets lanes “staggering.”

Years of neglect and a lack of funding are the culprits, according to the review.

“This deferred maintenance and lack of improvement have resulted in severe deterioration to the city’s transportation facilities,’ the audit, conducted by the Department of Public Works, concluded.

Officials estimate it will cost $732 million for city streets to be upgraded to fair condition from the current rating of poor. To keep the streets in fair condition — a 4 on a 10-point scale — another $178 million a year would be needed for upkeep, more than double the current annual funding that Indianapolis has available for all roads, bridge and sidewalk projects.

Officials said a decades-spanning cycle of neglect accelerates the longer it’s ignored. The roads are deteriorating faster than the city can rebuild or maintain them, and as the number of failed streets grows, the city needs more and more money to fix them.

“The city is always behind, there is not enough revenue to cover our needs,’’ said Zach Adamson, a member of City-County Council’s Public Works Committee. “We are painfully aware of the roads we drive on and spend every nickel possible on them, but obviously that’s not adequate.”

What it means for drivers is that the outbreak of gaping potholes that have been wrecking tires and causing widespread consternation this winter will likely get worse in coming years unless a mammoth infusion of cash is found.

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It also means city leaders must take a tiny bit of solace in filling potholes instead of making long-term repairs, as Mayor Joe Hogsett and Adamson did Jan. 19, when they put on reflective vests, grabbed shovels and filled the craters themselves, then followed up with a news release boasting that 24,000 potholes had been filled in a three-day span.

But transportation experts said plugging potholes is a sign of surrender, not a victory formation. The solution has to be comprehensive, long-term funding, or the holes will reappear perennially, as reliably as a black-eyed Susan.

Hogsett is acutely aware of the problem, said his chief of staff Thomas Cook.

“When we got into office, we took a close look at roads and at the condition of our bank account and both were in bad shape,” Cook said. “We are trying to be creative and proactive with funding, but it’s still not enough money.”

The roads’ “poor” rating means it scores a 3 on the 10-point scale of the Pavement Surface Evaluation and Rating system, a universally applied evaluation for roads. The 1 rating is considered a failed road in need of complete reconstruction, which costs 10 times more than resurfacing. It costs $1.56 million to pave 10 miles of road in Indianapolis.

Streets generally need to be resurfaced every 10 to 20 years depending on whether they are a heavily traveled thoroughfare or a lightly tread side street. That means from 5 to 10 percent of roads should be resurfaced every year. In Indianapolis, that’s 400 to 800 miles a year, which would cost up to $120 million.

Indianapolis' budget this year is $1.1 billion, and its entire transportation budget is $80 million, which also goes toward sidewalk repair, bridges, curbs and roundabouts. In 2017, the city resurfaced 90 miles of streets, with $16 million carved out for paving and another $18 million for street, sidewalk and drainage repairs.

“If I had a magic wand, I would wish for finances but we don’t have the money,” said Janice McHenry, a northwest side councilor since 2008. To address the gap in repaving “would take our whole budget and leave nothing for public safety, nothing for parks,” she said.

“Let’s be realistic even a billion dollars wouldn’t do it,” McHenry said.

But continually filling potholes with asphalt that seem to get trampled out in a few days and lets more moisture under the street only worsens the fundamental problem, said Lucius Riccio, a former commissioner for the New York Department of Transportation.

“Pothole filling is not something to celebrate but should be a warning that the smart thing hasn’t been done,” said Riccio, a lecturer on operations management, analytics and decision modeling Columbia University in New York. “The less you do on the front end the more you get backed up.”

Without a regular, rotating schedule of resurfacing and sealing of cracks, potholes are inevitable. And the further behind the city falls, the bigger and more frequent the holes get.

Riccio created a mathematical formula that shows how decreases in street resurfacing lead to an increase in potholes and a drop in a street’s rating in New York. Every lane mile the city didn’t repave on a regular schedule produced 80 potholes per block, he said.

Kumares Sinha, an engineering professor at Purdue University, said repaving is one tool in keeping streets in good condition but aggressively sealing cracks also prevents deterioration.

“Proactive maintenance is something that is commonly ignored, but it costs far less than filling potholes and can delay erosion by two years,” Sinha said. “Studies show that they reduce the number of the potholes.”

The Department of Public Works set aside $1.1 million to seal cracks in 2017, which covered 200 lane miles. But Director Dan Parker said the giant swings in temperature during the winter has made crack sealing tricky because it needs to be done when temperatures are warm.

“In January we had a bunch of instances in which we went from subzero temperature to above freezing,” Parker said.”You can't do it in the winter.”

Indianapolis’ street woes are complicated by aging infrastructure, especially below ground; Citizens Energy digs under the pavement about 500 times a year to fix broken water mains, which speeds up the decay of the road.

Citizens spokesman Dan Considine said 34 percent, or 1,500 miles, of the utility’s underground water lines are more than 50 years old. The digging doesn’t include routine pipe replacement or big projects, such as DigIndy, the $2 billion, 28-mile tunnel being bored through the rock underneath the streets. The project is currently forcing the closing of Meridian Street at 28th Street for 10 months.

Indianapolis has made grand attempts in the recent past to cut into its infrastructure deficit, but they amounted to one-time fixes.

In 2008 the city identified $1.5 billion in needed repairs to roads, bridges and sidewalks. Former Mayor Greg Ballard created a $450 million infrastructure fund using money from selling the city’s water utility.

By 2014, the fund had paid the repaving of 900 miles of streets. In 2015, another $340 million was dedicated mostly to street paving. But the funds were a one-time boost and the city would have to rely on its regular annual budget to maintain the roads.

“Looking back at it, that was just a drop in the bucket,” McHenry said.

Hogsett boosted infrastructure spending in his second budget and plans to keep it funded at about the same level for several years. The city will spend about $300 million on transportation projects through 2020 but only about $145 million will go toward street resurfacing, sidewalks and drainage. Another $63 million is targeted for bridge rehabilitation.

But the city doesn’t have any large assets left to sell, such as the utility or the parking meters, as Ballard did, to gather $731 million to improve the streets' poor condition rating. And Hogsett is against raising income taxes to pay for it because he says it will cause residents to move and reduce tax revenues in the long run. The City Council has raised income taxes in recent years twice for public safety and once for mass transit.

Last year, the city got a funding boost from the Indiana General Assembly, which raised the gas tax to 28 cents. Indianapolis received $8 million last year, will get $12 million in 2018, $18 million in 2019 and $15 million in 2020. But officials note that the windfall is not as large as it might have been in years past because of the proliferation of electric and more fuel-efficient cars, which depresses the amount of gas purchased.

So the key is trying to spend smarter, Cook said, and collect revenues for roads in creative ways. One approach being used is to not just repave roads but to fix cracks in the concrete foundation underneath the asphalt. It means budgeting about $250,000 for every road mile of repaving instead of $150,000.

“It costs more but it is worth it,”Cook said. “It means they last longer and won’t see potholes start to show in a couple of years after it is paved.”

The city also will make sure that money collected within tax increment financing districts is spent on roads in the district, as they are supposed to be. Often, the revenue is spent on other economic development initiatives. If the city rededicates TIF funds to roads, it means more transportation funds for the rest of the city, said City Controller Fady Qaddoura.

A so-called commuter tax could also help fill the gap and is also supported by the mayor. The tax would require suburbanites who work in Marion County to contribute a portion of their income taxes to Indianapolis. Currently, all income tax revenue goes to the county in which a resident lives.

The tax would ensure that 200,000 drivers who commute to Indianapolis each day help pay for the maintenance of the roads they use and help ruin. But the Indiana General Assembly would have to approve the shift in taxing.

Cook said that legislative assistance wasn't a far-fetched idea.

"A couple a years ago few people would have anticipated them raising the gas tax," Cook said. "But I think there is a realization now that transportation and roads are regional issues. The roads here are just as much a problem for the region as they are for the city."

Call IndyStar reporter John Tuohy at (317) 444-6418. Follow on Twitter and Facebook.