Fighting potholes | With many Maine roads in sorry shape, towns consider the economic impact of sinkholes, cracked asphalt and bumpy thoroughfares

In the soft breezes of spring, Maine drivers can describe with a touch less trauma their stories of 200-foot cracks, sink holes, frost heaves, broken mufflers and punctured oil pans. "The roads, I have never seen them so bad," says Paul Greenlaw, owner of oil distributor R.L. Greenlaw and Son in Stonington.

The harsh winter scrunched and buckled roads all over Maine, and in one town, a main thoroughfare deteriorated so badly that townspeople staged a creative protest.

Lincolnville residents bought a couple hundred locally made bumper stickers with slogans such as, "Sorry I'm late ˆ…(I took Route 52)." Their agitation finally brought Gov. John Baldacci to town to quell what appeared to be the stirrings of an actual uprising. He stopped by Feb. 14 after some residents warned they would protest at the Camden Snow Bowl where Baldacci had planned to take a ceremonial toboggan ride, according to Andy Young, who started a petition to cut local taxes to the state until Route 52 was repaired.

"We demanded the governor come and talk," says Young, owner of Bald Rock Builders in Lincolnville. He describes how one unnamed person was gearing up to slap one of the infamous Route 52 bumper stickers on Baldacci's toboggan as the governor raced down the Camden ski slope.

The state is not impervious to the discontent of taxpayers. If townspeople make enough noise about bad roads, they will likely grab the attention of a bureaucrat and help reorder the road repair schedule. Martin Rooney, a transportation planner with the Maine Department of Transportation, says the department prioritizes which roads get fixed based on several justifications. (For an explanation on how the state selects roads for improvement, see "By the book," below.)

"We do public outreach. We send a letter ˆ— a request for projects to municipalities, a wish list," Rooney says. "That lets us know what folks want us to do. We also receive letters, complaints, et cetera, and that's another layer." Besides hearing from people, the DOT conducts its own engineering analyses on roads to see how much life they have left in them. Also, when the DOT has a chance to partner with a university, town or private developer to cover some of the road improvement costs, it will likely bump that particular project up the list, according to Rooney.

But as the state grapples with its expansive network of roads and tight highway budget, it inevitably comes up short against the need. From Kittery to Fort Kent, Maine roads are in terrible shape after a winter packed with extreme storms and heavy weather. The state's rural expanses and the inclement weather, combined with escalating asphalt and construction costs, make it difficult for road crews to keep up. "We have one of the worst climates for roads in the country," Rooney says. The regular cycle of freezing and thawing and re-freezing creates frost-heave mayhem.

Residents in Lincolnville, Stonington and Bowdoinham all had good reason to claim they had the worst road in Maine, as they inched their cars down bumpy, pothole-infested local state highways. Townspeople in all three did their best to convince the DOT to come to the rescue, but like many communities across the state, they found that some roads will get repaired this summer, some won't, and some will just get the minimum amount of attention.

Roads are Maine's economic lifeblood, and the state's business owners this winter had to contend with the slights the bad roads inflicted on their trucks, and their bottom lines. While some residents and business owners clamored for change, a few also admitted they had resigned themselves to certain road conditions. It's just another cost of doing business in Maine.

"As sad as it might seem, I don't have a hope that we're going to get any response to make roads better for townspeople and businesses," confesses Stonington Town Manager Kathleen Billings-Pezaris.

Causing a ruckus

Young, whose residential construction business is located off of Route 52 in Lincolnville, says this past winter he bumped a ladder rack off one of his trucks and a muffler fell off another. He spent between $700 and $1,200 fixing up his company vehicles, he says. "On incredibly bumpy roads, things snap and break," he says.

Last spring, too, after Route 52 had suffered several winters without repairs, Young says he had to postpone building a home in Camden for six weeks to spare his trucks the rigors of driving down the devastated road. And at least one client has opted out of building a home in Lincolnville because of the crumbling street, Young claims.

This year, projects may also be slow to start, but Young says the roads are getting spared some of his ire. "Luckily, the overall economy stinks so I can't blame all of it on the roads," he admits.

Nearby in Lincolnville, electrician Justin Doan, who has his own business, saw in the beaten-up roadway an opportunity for citizen activism. He had observed other communities use bumper stickers to raise awareness about a local issue, and he thought Lincolnville's cause could be similarly helped.

He visited a graphic designer in Rockland, PDQ Signs, and together they came up with the stickers. One read, "Sorry I'm lateˆ… (I took Route 52)," and the other had the sign of Route 52 on it with the word "Sucks!" stamped across it. "[The latter] appealed to a slightly different demographic," Doan explains.

He sold the two stickers, which cost $2.50 apiece to make, for $3 each at Drake Corner Store in Lincolnville. "There were some laughable accusations that I was profiteering from the dire needs of the road situation and that I should donate profits to fixing the roads," Doan says, adding he took a financial loss on the project.

Doan says his campaign arose partly from the toll the roads were having on his own business. One of his employees stopped commuting to Doan's workshop in Lincolnville because it was taking double the time for him to make the tripˆ—plus, the drive was wearing down his truck. Doan also had to mollify delivery couriers who balked at driving down Route 52 by agreeing to pick up his packages in Rockport or Rockland.

Paul Greenlaw in Stonington, too, says he probably spent at least $4,000 repairing his banged up fleet of four oil delivery trucks. "I didn't lose any business," he says, "But it's just so hard on the equipment. We've got sinkholes, and parts of the road are at right-hand angles. It pounds the daylights out of everything."

Billings-Pezaris explains that a good 12 miles of Route 15 coming across the bridge and into Stonington are in the sorriest shape she's ever seen. "I've seen rough roads before, but it was nothing like this," she says, describing the road as having huge cracks, great humps and a missing lane at one stretch forcing drivers to swing into the opposite lane against oncoming traffic.

"Route 15 is a major transportation network here," she continues. "Everything we use on the island is delivered down the road." Oil, groceries, gas ˆ— "they're all coming from off the island," she adds. When it became difficult to drive down the length of road, businesses were held up. Instead of taking 20 minutes to drive 12 miles, people were making the trip in 35 minutes or more.

Plus, the town, too, had to spend a little extra on their trucks. "We replaced the springs completely on one truck," Billings-Pezaris says, noting that cost the town between $5,000 and $6,000.

Greenlaw collected more than 600 signatures and sent them on to the state, which sent back a letter saying "they understand," as Greenlaw puts it. The DOT is planning some pavement work on the route this summer.

Since Baldacci came to Lincolnville, too, people in town have simmered down. "He pretty much deflated the whole effort rather skillfully," Doan says. "He came across with real empathy and said, 'Hey, we don't have enough money.'"

Squeaky wheel gets the grease?

The state maintains 8,400 miles of roads. About 1,600 miles of these major routes have never been built to modern standards with proper drainage, highway base or dimensional width. The state eventually will have to rebuild these roads, but in the meantime, it has to keep on top of them with lighter maintenance every few years.

And every two years, the state's transportation planners present a work plan for the Legislature's approval.

In 2007, Maine DOT Commissioner David Cole signed off on a plan for 2008 and 2009 that called for at least $775 million in capital improvements ˆ— including highways, bridges, rail, ferries, bicycle paths and airports ˆ— to maintain and improve Maine's "large and aging system." The plan explained that 63% of these projects would be federally funded, with the state's share incorporating a $136 million bond package. The report included the caveat that any of the anticipated road projects could be delayed or adapted due to state revenue shortfalls and inflating costs. Construction costs bloomed 35% between 2005 and 2007. And during the previous two-year road cycle, Maine deferred more than $200 million of transportation projects in dozens of communities.

Route 52 in Lincolnville, a languishing project, had not been included in the 2008/2009 work plan but is now scheduled for overdue repairs.

"Our philosophy and underlying motivation is to be fair and do what's best with the limited funding we have," Maine DOT spokesman Herb Thomson says. "We're always open to public input. When members of the public bring things to our attention, it will frequently be a catalyst for us to go and investigate the situation."

That was the hope in Bowdoinham, where Town Manager Kathy Durgin-Leighton kept a log this winter of people who called the town office to complain about Route 24. After more than two dozen complaints, she stopped counting. Another resident, too, tacked up a poster at the country store urging people upset about the condition of the road to contact the state.

"There was definitely an effort in town to let the DOT know how bad the road was," she says. "One of my residents described it as riding the back of a dinosaur. You had to go five miles per hour on a 40-miles-per-hour road."

In Bowdoinham's case, the voices of the people may have been heard, but they did not bring about change. The state has no plans to fix up the route this summer, according to Bill Croce, project manager for the DOT's Bureau of Transportation Systems Planning.

In the case of Lincolnville, however, the state did respond. Perhaps it was the noisy combination of the sarcastic bumper stickers, the planned-but-unexecuted tobogganing prank and the citizen petition to cut town funding to the state until the route was improved.

Andy Young says he gathered 300 signatures to force the town of Lincolnville to stop making payments to the state. But the selectboard had to reject the citizen push after the town attorney declared the action illegal. Yet, if the road is still not fixed, Young warns he'll resurrect the protest.

Doan says he thinks his bumper stickers boosted the cause. "I think it was successful," he says. "It made the front page in newspapers that may have buried it inside."

Croce says in July, for $325,000, the DOT will fix four miles of Route 52 heading south from Belfast. On the other end of the road, the state will do a surface treatment on 13.5 miles of pavement starting at the Camden side for $450,000. This overlay won't be as durable as the treatment to the northerly four miles, but will hold the road for three to four years, he says.

Stonington's Route 15 will get two miles of maintenance surface treatment for $80,000. But Route 24 in Bowdoinham is out of luck. "There's nothing in the system right now for improvements in 2008," Croce says, after scanning the lists.