A Capital Letter: The pothole on my street reminds me of Wellington's mayoral race

The leaking pothole had to be patched more than once. Photo / Georgina Campbell

Opinion:

The pothole on my street, which produces a foul odour and has only got worse after repeated attempts to patch it up, epitomises the issues at play in Wellington's mayoral race.

The pothole appeared several months ago.

At first, it was just a slight dip in the road. Then it slowly sank further to form a pit, at which point I started swerving my car to avoid it.

I was a terrible neighbour and didn't report it through the council's FIXiT app or phone in to the contact centre. I just sort of hoped someone else would deal with it.

It didn't bother me too much because I catch the bus to work and only drive occasionally at the weekends.

But then, it started leaking.

A leak on one's street is every Wellingtonian's worst nightmare. It's the sort of thing you feel is inevitable considering the city's water woes, but you still hope you might avoid dealing with Wellington Water.

The leak dribbled a few metres down the road and had a yucky smell to it, which made me think a wastewater pipe was bubbling away beneath the surface.

Would we have poo on our street too!? Oh, the horror.

The pothole was finally fixed last week. Photo / Supplied

Then some orange cones appeared (obviously a neighbour had contacted the council - bless them) and later that day the pothole was filled in with what looked to be asphalt.

I was relieved and thought the situation wasn't so bad after all because it had been fixed within a few weeks.

My optimism didn't last long. The asphalt soon started to sink before it again turned into a pit and the leaking resumed.

To make matters worse, a new pothole had also formed just a few metres down from the first one.

I asked the council about the pothole on my street. As it turns out, 14 inquiries have been made about it since it was first flagged in mid-February.

A road maintenance team investigated straight away but determined it was indeed a water issue causing the failure.

The problem was a fractured wastewater connection. Photo / Supplied

It was patched up and referred to Wellington Water, but "due to an error" it reached the water company only in early March, council spokesman Richard MacLean told me.

The pothole had to be patched up more than once.

Last week I was on the cusp of finally reporting the pothole to the council, to add my voice to those of my neighbours, when one morning lots of orange cones appeared.

Traffic management was in place and trucks were parked near the offending pothole.

I crossed my fingers but didn't hold my breath, as a rare 30x bus whisked me away to work (this bus service is mostly cancelled these days).

When I returned home that night, I examined the contractor's work in the dark.

This time an entire section of the road looked to have been dug up and replaced. The pothole was nowhere in sight.

MacLean said it was a fractured wastewater connection that was the problem.

"As one can see from the images, it is not a small task and required road closure, excavator etc with a complement of different skilled crews from Wellington Water," MacLean said.

The final fix. Photo / Supplied

The pothole saga was annoying, took a long time to resolve, and made me anxious.

Our front-runner mayoral candidates are promising to prioritise core infrastructure.

This message will undoubtedly appeal to most Wellingtonians, who expect their council to get the basics right after decades of underinvestment in core infrastructure.

People who have a problem pothole on their street for months, for example.

Labour Rongotai MP Paul Eagle is going as far as running a "back to basics" campaign.

He has said that while fixing infrastructure might sound a little boring, doing so was about restoring the mana of the capital city.

But this is Wellington, and I would like to think people care about more than just getting a pothole fixed in a timely manner.

I hope that none of the mayoral candidates focuses too much on compensating for the current council's less-than-ideal past term, if they were to be elected.

It would be so ironic that, after years of not doing enough, we spent a further three years steadying the ship only to find ourselves even further behind.

That's death-spiral territory.

We should fix the basics, but we must move forward too. One of Wellington's worst traits is our apparent obsession with over-consulting, holding up progress in the courts, and doing nothing.

With less than two weeks of local body elections left to go, I am feeling a bit underwhelmed by the mayoral campaign.

In some ways it's not really the candidates' fault, the campaign is just a reflection of the state that Wellington is in - like the pothole on my street.

• Senior Wellington journalist Georgina Campbell's fortnightly column looks closely at issues in the capital.