Potholes? Sorry. The city is digging out of its own budget hole
(Image generated with MidJourney)
The conditions on Los Angeles streets have never been great. As the city contends with a massive budget deficit, the question is: Will they get worse?
This June, the city council officially declared a state of fiscal emergency due to the roughly $1 billion current shortfall, a number that city officials predict will only get bigger. The tightening purse strings could slow Los Angeles’s ability to fill in the numerous potholes that line city streets.
The outlook is not great. The number of complaints made to the city’s MyLA311 service spiked two years ago and remains high.
An official at the city’s Bureau of Street Services attributed the sudden surge in complaints to the heavy rains the region received during those two winter periods. There is, in fact, a pothole season – late winter to early spring. That means that the city usually receives the bulk of its complaints in the first half of the year.
Black hole
How many more potholes can the city fill? Likely not as many as it has previously. The Bureau of Street Services has 28 pothole trucks. Currently, only 12 run daily, according to an official at the bureau. The others sit idle because of chronic staffing shortages.
Here’s a peek at recent history:
In the city’s strange accounting methods, it is actually filling more potholes than there are complaints. There’s a reason: A call frequently points work crews to a cluster of potholes. So a single report can result in three, four or five potholes getting filled.
How many potholes were filled before fiscal year 2024? The city doesn’t actually know. A different record-keeping system was used then, and it didn’t record the total number of potholes.
In the just-approved budget for fiscal year 2025-26, the city appropriated $168,811,761 for the Bureau of Street Services. That’s about a 3.3% drop from the prior year and it’s only $4 million more than the bureau’s budget in the 2014-15 fiscal year, more than a decade ago, not accounting for inflation. The city has signalled plans to slow hiring of workers this year in an effort to save money.
Some neighborhoods fare worse than others when it comes to potholes. In the April-June period this year, Westchester reported the most potholes, with 404, followed by Sherman Oaks (336) and Van Nuys (331). At the bottom of the list, Adams Normandie, with just five.
How we did it: We examined data provided by the Los Angeles Bureau of Street Services, as well as data from the city’s MyLA311 service.
Have questions about our data? Write to us at askus@xtown.la
