The extreme prairie weather arguably hits us hardest in January. Following that, it hits us where the sun don’t shine: the chassis of our vehicles.

Year after year, I make the same observation while everyone else goes on their daily pothole-fixing-service bashing. The pothole situation arises before the snow even melts, and long before winter is over.

Frantic Winnipeggers start screaming about potholes before it is even possible or realistic to fix them, literally as they are being created when our ageing concrete roads meet the forces of nature.

“Why can’t we fix the damn potholes?!” the average taxpayer screams. “Look at all these potholes, it’s ridiculous, why doesn’t the city fix the damn roads?!” the angry sedan owner who just bottomed out yells, careening down Pembina Highway in a late afternoon’s rush hour traffic.

By mid-February or March, after a couple of warm days that expose our crumbling infrastructure, the dissenters raise their voices.

It is unrealistic to expect a city-wide issue that affects every single road to be taken care of in a matter of hours or days. This is a game of whack-a-mole that starts sometime after Groundhog Day, with, by my approximation anyways, 3,464,892 pothole locations to be addressed.

It is a game that is impossible to win.

This year, the City of Winnipeg went on the offensive. Taking advantage of the warm weather to send out three pothole trucks in addition to manual crews.

“ Considering a hole in the road requires only a few shovels full of asphalt and the cost of labour, a million dollars buys you a lot of filled potholes

The press release was timed perfectly to assure people that the city is on the ball. Contrast that with past years of freeze-thaw-freeze cycles, pothole sponsorship debates and wonky weather that sent Winnipeg back into the deep freeze, preventing and postponing road maintenance.

I’m glad this year that I have not yet heard an enraging CJOB debate about potholes as if Winnipeg can never get it done right, though I may have not been tuned in for it. But I digress.

For Sam Katz’s entire stint as mayor, the city has set aside approximately $1 million per year for the annual pothole festival.

Considering a hole in the road requires only a few shovels full of asphalt and the cost of labour, a million dollars buys you a lot of filled potholes.

How many potholes you ask? An average of 250,000 potholes are filled in and patched each year.

In a particularly bad year, as 2009 was, the city patched a whopping 450,000 potholes at a cost of $2.5 million.

Sam Katz’s administration has certainly beefed up the pothole-patching fleet over the years. Not a cheap endeavour – a pothole patching machine costs around $350,000.

As of March 2010, there are 12 pothole trucks in the patching fleet. With the addition of manual crews patching by hand, Winnipeg ends up leading a small army onto the streets every year to address this problem.

Just as with we do with six inches of snow, a blizzard, a flood or mosquitoes, we do a remarkably fine job.

We can dig our city out over night, we can nuke it with malathion on command and we can fix a quarter of a million potholes within a time span of a few months. In my mind, that’s worth bragging about.

But it won’t stop Winnipeggers from being ‘Peggers. Our services are never good enough. 

Perfection, it seems, is forever out of reach.

Graham Hnatiuk blogs about civic issues and more at http://progressivewinnipeg.blogspot.com.

Published in Volume 65, Number 21 of The Uniter (March 3, 2011)