Road Repairs: Do More Affluent Neighborhoods Receive Preferential Treatment?
Most people that visit Ken Drennon are certain that he lives in Gardena. As Ken will readily tell you, however, he is a proud resident of Torrance. Ken claims nobody believes he lives in Torrance due to the condition of his street. He has lived just off 164th street (pictured right) for the past 35 years. Not once, in all that time, does he recall 164th being paved. The street is in such disrepair that Ken can fit a full sized stapler in many of its cracks.
Road repairs, or the lack thereof, is a big issue in Torrance. Former Mayor Scotto recently stated in a Daily Breeze article that residents are “seeing a lot of potholes, because they [the roads] are 10 years past when they should have been fixed.”
Ken has a bad back and says that constantly traveling the bumpy road is painful. He’s called the City several times a year for the past 10 years to see if they could do anything about his street. At his wits end, Ken recently decided to show up at City Council meeting to complain. The timing was ironic as the Council recently budgeted an additional $1 Million for road repairs to address the poor condition of Torrance streets. Unfortunately for Ken, however, it does not appear any of that money will be going to fix 164th or any other street in his neighborhood.
A staff report indicates that money will instead first go to paving streets in some of the wealthiest areas of town. Those neighborhoods can be found here and include such streets as Reese Road (pictured right). Another recent staff report reveals that decisions on what roads to pave are based on the existing pavement conditions, current maintenance needs, and the length of time that has elapsed since previous repairs were completed.
Whether Reese Road and the others designated for repair are truly the highest priority or whether some neighborhoods receive preferential treatment is difficult to say for certain without additional information. Ken, for his part, can’t say for sure, but what he will say is that he doesn’t believe his street would look like it does if he lived on the other side of town.
As part of researching this post, I searched the city website for a road repair plan. I was not successful. I believe questions such as the one I posit here could be easily answered if the City provided a transparent means to know when each street was scheduled for repair and what the current prioritization was. Wouldn’t it be great if you could search the website for your street and see when it was last repaired and when the next scheduled maintenance was as well as how it was prioritized among all the rest of the streets.
Politicans don’t want to be transparent. It all goes back to German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck “Don’t let the people see how the sausage is made”. In 2009-2010 the Dems showed America how Obamacare was passed and they suffered big time in the Nov. 2010 elections. They will suffer again in Nov. 2014. It seems the #1 job of politicians is to keep their bosses ie. “We the People” ignorant of what they are doing. If we actually knew how corrupt and incompetent these folks are from Torrance City Council, the TUSD Board of Education, Sacramento and D.C. not too many of them would be re-elected.
Search a website, find your street and note when it was last upgraded: Really good idea, and simple too, Clint. I think an intern, even a high schooler, could put that together.
Last spring I happened to be near the street in Torrance that you described, and I too was shocked that it was Torrance. It looks sort of like the land that Torrance forgot.
ABSOLUTELY