La Jollans Take Pothole Problem Personally : Activism: Adopt-a-Pothole program urges residents to keep calling the city about a section of damaged street until it is repaired.

The mean streets of La Jolla are getting meaner by the minute.

We’re not talking criminals here, of course.

It’s the pesky potholes.

Big, nasty, mud-spewing cesspool-type potholes, residents say. Big enough to break a bus axle, bathe a baby or house a family of four.

It’s enough to make a tourist town throw a tantrum. But La Jollans have a better idea. They’ve started an Adopt-a-Pothole program, a way to put their foot down on the bloated, big-city bureaucracy.

The idea, organizers say, is to get those burly men with shovels and backhoes to come out and fix the blasted things.

Here’s how it happens: Citizens pick a pothole--any pothole, either outside their house or along their route to work. Then they call city transportation workers--daily, weekly or hourly, as necessary--until somebody cries “Uncle!” and comes out to fill the eyesore.

“There are scores of these terrible potholes all over La Jolla,” said resident Pamella Innis. “You fall into them. These things do happen.”

Innis, a stylish, self-employed jewelry designer who likes to wear her wares, was the inspiration behind the pothole program. She lost three cars in one week, she jokes.

Gone. Just like that. Swallowed whole by a pothole.

The bane of Innis’ existence is a gaping hole on Torrey Pines Road near the Summer House Inn that she must dodge daily on her travels throughout the palm-studded coastal neighborhood.

As the weeks and months passed, the hole grew from garden-sized to an asphalt crater.

“My little adopted pothole got chubbier as time went on,” she said. “Then it grew to become a teen-ager. They fed it. But then it got hungry again.”

So, as a member of the La Jolla Town Council’s Beautification Committee, Innis got on the horn to politicians, civic pavers and road plumbers--anyone who would listen. And she encouraged others to do the same.

In a letter published in a community newspaper, Innis encouraged fellow La Jollans to call San Diego’s street maintenance department with the exact location of their adopted pothole--and that means street, block number and cross street.

“Please ask that it be fed substantially,” the letter instructed, “and not that stuff that only lasts a few months.”

“Then you call the city,” she added. “Politely, you ask if they don’t mind feeding the hole. Then you call back again. And you ask ‘How are you doing on my pothole?’ ”

City officials say they’re not intimidated by the new pothole watchdog program. With 2,600 miles of streets to patrol, they need all the help they can get in finding the tire-swallowing suckers.

“We always need more eyes and ears to find the potholes because we really don’t have a system that allows us to wander the streets to look for them ourselves,” said Larry Villa, acting deputy director of the street division of the San Diego general services department.

Innis and others say the pothole program is a way to get specific about problems in La Jolla, rather than calling officials to complain, for example, about the horrible condition of neighborhood streets.

And, Innis said, La Jollans have a lot to complain about--from unsightly weeds to unpainted curbs.

“I’ve seen other tourist destinations in the region such as Palm Desert and Del Mar,” she said, “and when I come back, I always ask myself ‘Why is La Jolla so dingy and scruffy-looking?’

“We don’t want to be a poor sister to Del Mar. We are a tourist destination. So we should start looking like one. We should start becoming that vacation ideal in people’s imaginations.”

Another reason, says Town Council Trustee Anna-Marie Glowak, is that La Jollans pay $20,000 a day in city taxes. And they don’t get their money’s worth in city services.

“Look at those red zones, they’re not even red anymore,” she said, looking down from her real estate office at the “No-Parking” curbs on Prospect Street. “We pay such high taxes. Those people should be out here more often.”

Other La Jollans say they are ignored by city services.

“We’ve called politicians and they tell us there’s just not enough money to fix everything,” Innis said. “With all the taxes we pay, that’s really, really annoying.

For their part, Villa said, city workers don’t play favorites. With 100 calls a week for services, they do the best they can.

“Look, to say that one neighborhood gets more service than another is simply not true,” he said. “We don’t look at how much people pay for their homes and then decide whether we’ll come out and fix their streets.

“A street is a street, whether there are shanties or mansions along either side of it. I know that people in expensive homes in La Jolla are saying they pay higher taxes, so that we should come see them first.

“But that wouldn’t be fair to the rest of the citizenry in San Diego.”

Actually, Innis said, city street workers have been cordial and responsive. Recently, after several calls for action, they’ve done some work on her adopted Torrey Pines Road pothole. And they’ve even begun to resurface her own street.

“They were great--even though it took them 19 years to come and do the job on my street,” she said. “You get the feeling like they’re just sitting there waiting for someone to tell them what to do.”

Innis admits that in a troubled world there is more to worry about than smooth streets. After all, she’s not asking her neighbors to adopt a homeless person or a starving child from Somalia.

They’re talking potholes in La Jolla.

“I realize that it’s not really controversial,” Innis said. “But when you want to change the world, you have to start somewhere.”