Lincoln's pothole bill from this winter comes in at right around a half million dollars. Yikes. That can't be good for the ol' budget.
A piece in the Journal Star this morning -- I can't find it online and The Missus stole the dead tree version so I can't give the name of the gentleman who wrote it -- made the very valid point that we're going to spend more and more on infrastructure fixes if we don't start improving our preventative maintenance programs in Lincoln. That goes for streets, sidewalks, water lines, sewers ... all that good stuff. Good infrastructure is something I'm willing to pay well for. I wish more Lincolnites felt the same way.
As for all those potholes? Many (most?) of the holes will need to be fixed again once the weather warms up. The temporary patches in place now need to be replaced with a more permanent solution. That half million isn't the end of the story.
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How do you propose we pay for that exactly? Wheel tax?
Just tax the PBR sales downtown… should pretty much pay for it by next month or so.
Good thing I stick to Keystone! 😉
But atleast we’ll have a kick ass arena that we can’t get to because the roads are crap! Wooohooo! I like our priorities!
There is no “either/or” situation here. It’s not roads vs. arena. It’s not roads or arena. There are lots of perfectly reasonable reasons to oppose the arena project. This is not one of them.
Correct, the existence of pot holes is not a reason to oppose the arena. However, I think Stacy’s point is that if we can’t even keep our roads in drivable conditions, how can we support a $400M arena? Also, if providing bare necessities (an actual, acceptable function of local government) has unexpected high costs that we may not be able to afford, should we really be spending $400M on an arena?
Not to defend potholes, but every city with traffic and snow/ice has potholes this time of year. They cant’ be fixed when there is ice/snow on the streets, and that’s been almost since October.
My home town of St. Louis, with much more traffic and wilder temperature swings (i.e. freeze/thaw cycles) gets potholes that small families could live in.
Omaha has some huge potholes, which I assumed was because of the Qwest Center. 😉
Nyuk Nyuk.
I think the main culprit was the out of towners. Those 96 basketball teams and all of their out of town visitors over the short two week period caused it all. If we could just keep those people off our streets we would be just fine.
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