So there you have it. Let the mayoral free-for-all begin.
Every living current and former mayor from the last twenty years is now a presumptive candidate. Jack Ford and John McHugh passed away earlier this year. But there’s still a month before the filing deadline, and Donna Owens is lurking in the shadows. And we hear Doug DeGood is living somewhere down south.
That means there is plenty of administrative experience on the ballot, including Sandy Drabik Collins’ time as an appointed agency head. All that experience doesn’t amount to a hill of beans if the eventual mayor can’t answer one simple question. How are you going to fix the roads?
Blame game
Granted, they didn’t get so pockmarked and rumbly overnight. It has been a long slow process of deterioration. And the record snowfall of the winter of twenty fourteen plus the polar vortex has wreaked havoc on the asphalt.
Those aren’t the only reasons for the state of disrepair, though. There are specific elected officials who must shoulder the blame, too. And one of them is on the ballot.
Carty made big noise about the number of road miles his administration “repaved.” But don’t be fooled, kideez. There is a huge difference between laying down a thin veneer of asphalt and actually fixing a road. Carty effectively gave the failing infrastructure a fresh coat of paint. He could cover lots of miles that way. But it simply put off the inevitable need for deep repair until later.
To his credit, Mike Bell refused to be enamored with road miles. Instead he used bond money to actually repair the roads. But there is a limit to how much debt the city can take on for such work, and when it’s reached, bye bye roadwork. Bell mortgaged the city against future tax revenue to fix roads, but now what?
Mayor Hicks Hudson is hamstrung. The past several budgets have transferred millions of dollars originally earmarked for capital improvements, including road repair, to balance the general fund. Much of the remaining capital improvement funds go to debt service. The amount of dollars left are peanuts compared to the need.
The current mayor has made good use of a mill and fill program, most notably on the Anthony Wayne Trail, to make patches on critical roadways. But this is no more than a stop gap measure. Where did the money for actual repair go?
Ask Ohio Governor John Kasich. He is running for president and touting his “Ohio miracle,” whereby he changed a budget deficit into a budget surplus for the state. He never mentions how he pulled that off: by stripping local governments like Toledo of state funds. Indeed, Toledo has lost tens of millions from the decreases in state funding, as well as the elimination of the estate tax and now the attack on revenues from red light cameras.
Those tens of millions of dollars would go far in addressing the needs of our roads. But Kasich isn’t campaigning on his disdain for urban areas. His conservative funders couldn’t care less if our roads fall into the crumbling sewers below them.
Show us the money
What will our next mayor do about it? Carty would likely slap a few of his underlings around and scream and gnash his teeth like he always does, but that won’t conjure a new budget reality. Sandy likes to invoke the memory of her late husband, but he didn’t do much about the roads in his short tenure in office. Bell won’t have new bonding authority to fall back on. Paula likes to say her campaign includes governing well, but it takes money to put heavy equipment to work.
All we have heard so far is platitudes from the major candidates. War on potholes. Right. But war costs money.
Face it, folks. There’s only one way to get the revenue needed. We wait for the first candidate with the guts to say it.
We need new taxes to fix our roads. Boom.
