Star Tribune
An endless winter cycle leads to potholes that are deeper, wider and more resistant to being fixed
On St. Paul’s Shepard Road, which carries 15,000 vehicles a day between Hwy. 5 and Interstate 35E, the potholes have won.
Rather than futilely continuing to patch and patch again, only to have freezing snowmelt and rainwater pop it all out, officials this week installed orange “rough roads” signs and lowered the posted speed limit to 35, down from 50 mph.
“It is frustrating for motorists and our staff alike,” St. Paul Public Works Director Sean Kershaw said. “Our street maintenance crews have been patching this section repeatedly, all winter long. They will patch it one day, and the next day they are back in the same spot because the plowing has knocked everything loose or the patch has already crumbled to gravel due to the underlying conditions of the road.”
The reality across much of the metro area is that these last weeks of winter with heavy snows, followed by warming, followed by rain, then freezing again are creating potholes that are not only deeper and wider but also more resistant to treatment. From alleys to long stretches of major thoroughfares in Bloomington, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Star Tribune readers on Twitter reported not just problem potholes here and there Friday but blocks-long stretches of potholes.
Part of the problem can be attributed to timing, said Lisa Hiebert, a spokeswoman for St. Paul Public Works. It’s still too cold for St. Paul to fire up its hot-mix asphalt plant, which usually happens in April, and the cold mix used for winter patching won’t take hold.
“It’s kind of like taking Oreo crumbs and trying to spread frosting on it,” Hiebert said. “It’s not going to hold together.”
Brittany Norberg and her husband live on W. Jessamine Avenue in St. Paul, not far from the border with Falcon Heights. “We drive extremely slow, like 2 miles per hour,” she said because the potholes are so bad on a two-block stretch of her street.
But not everyone does, Norberg said.
“Some people get behind someone going that slow and they get angry and whip past,” she said. “Then they hit the potholes, and they’re hitting them hard.”
At Capitol City Station on Shepard Road, owner Todd Knudten and area resident Robert Orth shared their frustrations with the chronically poor conditions of the road and its seemingly unbeatable potholes.
“Every year, they fill them with asphalt, but it’s like putting a Band-Aid on cancer,” Orth said. “It’s dangerous.”
Knudten said that despite Shepard Road being heavily used, “It doesn’t seem this road is a priority. “
He said the only way St. Paul will be able to get ahead on Shepard is to completely rebuild the roadway. Patching isn’t enough.
“Why isn’t the problem solved? It’s not rocket science,” he said. “All of the stuff they’re throwing in the holes now is popping out of the hole in about an hour.”
On that point, he appears to have an ally in Kershaw. But despite the Public Works director saying the same things that previous Public Works directors have said — that many of the city’s roads need a complete rebuild — officials acknowledge it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.
The money just isn’t there. In fact, the city’s street reconstruction budget is now on a 124-year cycle.
In December, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter with City Council support proposed adding a 1% sales tax to goods and services sold in St. Paul to improve the capital city’s notoriously bad roads and aging park facilities. That increase over 20 years would infuse nearly $1 billion into the city’s capital budget — with $738 million going to rebuilding and improving roads. But the city first must convince state lawmakers, then voters.
According to a 2019 study by Public Works, without additional funding, city-owned arterial and collector streets will drop to “very poor” condition from the current condition of “fair to poor” in the next 20 years.
The alarm has been sounded before. In 2014, John Maczko, then-St. Paul city engineer, said the city, county and state needed to pump more money into rebuilding St. Paul’s 900 miles of roads or the bone-jarring potholes would continue.
At the time, Maczko said St. Paul needed another $20 million a year over its road rebuilding budget of $12.5 million to get all its streets to a passing grade. Hiebert said the gap now is more like $30 million per year.
TELL US WHAT YOU’RE SEEING ON THE ROADS
The Lynx are in the hot seat.
The team lost Game 3 of the WNBA Finals series against the New York Liberty on Wednesday night 77-80, setting the stage for a decisive match at Target Center on Friday night. Fans in the arena reacted with resounding disappointment after Sabrina Ionescu sunk a three-pointer to break away from the tie game and dashed the Lynx’s chance at forcing overtime.
Before we get to the reactions, first things first: The Lynx set an attendance record, filling Target Center with 19,521 spectators for the first time in franchise history. That’s nearly 500 more than when Caitlin Clark was in town with the Indiana Fever earlier this year.
Despite leading by double digits for much of the game, the Lynx began the fourth quarter with a one-point lead over the Liberty and struggled to stay more than two or three points ahead throughout.
The Liberty took the lead with minutes to go in the fourth quarter and folks were practically despondent.
Of course, there were people who were in it solely for the spectacle. Nothing more.
The Lynx took a commanding lead early in the first quarter and ended the first half in winning position, setting a particularly jovial mood among the fanbase to start the game.
Inside Target Center, arena announcers spent a few minutes before the game harassing Lynx fans — and Liberty fans — who had not yet donned the complementary T-shirts draped over every seat.
DULUTH – The Minnesota and Wisconsin transportation departments will make upgrades to the Richard I. Bong Memorial Bridge in the summer of 2025, in preparation for the structure to become the premiere route between this city and Superior during reconstruction of the Blatnik Bridge.
Built in 1961, the Blatnik Bridge carries 33,000 vehicles per day along Interstate 535 and Hwy. 53. It will be entirely rebuilt, starting in 2027, with the help of $1 billion in federal funding announced earlier this year. MnDOT and WisDOT are splitting the remaining costs of the project, about $4 million each.
According to MnDOT, projects on the Bong Bridge will include spot painting, concrete surface repairs to the bridge abutments, concrete sealer on the deck, replacing rubber strip seal membranes on the main span’s joints and replacing light poles on the bridge and its points of entry. It’s expected to take two months, transportation officials said during a recent meeting at the Superior Public Library.
During this time there will be occasional lane closures, detours at the off-ramps, and for about three weeks the sidewalk path alongside the bridge will be closed.
The Bong Bridge, which crosses the St. Louis River, opened to traffic in 1985 and is the lesser-used of the two bridges. Officials said they want to keep maintenance to a minimum on the span during the Blatnik project, which is expected to take four years.
Red Wing will celebrate the grand opening of its first permanent set of pickleball courts next week with an “inaugural play” on the six courts at Colvill Park on the banks of the Mississippi, between a couple of marinas and next to the aquatic center.
Among the first to get to play on the new courts will be David Anderson, who brought pickleball to the local YMCA in 2008, before the nationwide pickleball craze took hold, and Denny Yecke, at 92 the oldest pickleball player in Red Wing.
The inaugural play begins at 11 a.m. Tuesday, with a rain date of the next day. Afterward will be food and celebration at the Colvill Park Courtyard building.
Tim Sletten, the city’s former police chief, discovered America’s fastest-growing sport a decade ago after he retired. With fellow members of the Red Wing Pickleball Group, he’d play indoors at the local YMCA or outdoors at a local school, on courts made for other sports. But they didn’t have a permanent place, so they approached the city about building one.
When a city feasibility study came up with a high cost, about $350,000, Sletten’s group got together to raise money.
The courts are even opening ahead of schedule, originally set for 2025.
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