Potholes! The result of our pothole contest

The edge of Short Street

Recently a decorahnews.com reader suggested we hold a contest to pick the worst potholes in the Decorah area.

So we asked our readers for nominations--and then went on a tour.  Something interesting happened on that tour.  It became obvious that there really wasn't an individual pothole that deserved the title of "Worst Pothole."  Instead, we discovered there were several streets that might deserve the title of "Worst Street."

This is an important difference.  Bad potholes are the result of inattention by street workers.  That's not the case in Decorah.  In fact, some of the potholes nominated by readers had already been filled in by the Decorah Street Department by the time we took our tour.

Bad streets, on the other hand, are the result of not having enough money to pay to repave them.  It's one thing to use a little bit of blacktop to fill in a pothole on an otherwise decent road.  But when a road gets TOO bad, the only satisfactory solution is to rip it up and repave it.

In short, our pothole contest has proven to us that the Decorah Street Department is doing an excellent job of maintaining roads, but the City of Decorah needs to do a better job of redoing some roads.

It gets back to the road funding problems we've discussed frequently on decorahnews.com--voters can't complain about bad roads if they're unwilling to allow higher taxes to collect the money necessary to pave for good roads.

OK--the southernmost part of Short Street (beyond Pizza Hut) gets our vote for the worst road in Decorah.  But the solution to that isn't to complain about the potholes--it's to give city government more money to pay for new roads.

Crews have done a decent job of patching Ice Cave Road.