Potholes Puncture Hahn’s Pledge

I located them by the hundreds -- San Fernando Valley, Westside, Eastside, South L.A., downtown.

Helen Keller could have found as many.

Mayor Jim Hahn has pledged to fill any pothole in the city within 24 hours. Just call 311 and it’s done.

So I set out Wednesday morning on crater patrol.

Hahn loves to tell how, as a kid, he rode around with Dad -- the late L.A. County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn -- looking for potholes. Today, he calls himself the mayor who gets the little things done.

“Now that we are caught up after the storm,” Hahn announced Jan. 18, “we will return to our pledge of repairing potholes within 24 hours.”

In his defense, it’s rained a lot since then, tearing holes in the pavement all over the city. More than 22,000 potholes have been filled, and city work crews have had trouble keeping up.

But a pledge is a pledge.

My first 311 call was from the intersection of Oxnard Street and Whitsett Avenue in North Hollywood. I reported a canyon about 2 feet square and 6 inches deep on the southeast corner. I also called in two doozies a block away on Beeman Avenue.

When you dial 311, you get a recording of Hahn himself, first in English and then in Spanish.

“Soy su alcalde Jim Hahn,” Jaime says before the call is transferred.

I was on hold several minutes before a woman picked up and said:

“Service request.”

I reported the potholes and she asked my name.

Voter, I said. Joseph.

If she thought the name Joe Voter was odd, she kept it to herself, as did other 311 operators I chatted with over the next few hours.

You get a confirmation number when you report a pothole. It’s like making a plane reservation, and I guess you can call back and see if the pothole crew is expected to arrive on time.

But the operator didn’t sound optimistic when I asked about the mayor’s 24-hour pledge. They were getting hundreds of calls a day, she told me, with 11 operators at the phones. Don’t count on one-day service, she said.

Look, if you’re going to define yourself by filling potholes, then fill potholes. Especially if you’re in the political fight of your life, with the May 17 election just around the corner. It’s not as if Hahn was tied up reinventing Los Angeles.

While driving to the Westside, I called the mayor’s office and asked if the 24-hour guarantee was still in effect. A clerk assured me, twice, that it was.

About 12:30 p.m., Joe Voter called in a monster in the 11900 block of Chaparal Street in Brentwood. It was 3 feet wide and a good 8 inches deep. I also reported a long, craggy stretch on Sunset Boulevard between Woodburn and Gunston drives.

My next call, from South Los Angeles, was placed at 1:45 p.m. On 75th Street, between Figueroa and Hoover, I saw a hole so big it had trash in it, along with an orange traffic cone.

In the same call, I reported a couple of rim-bashers on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. If you’re desperately trying to hold onto the black vote, as Hahn is, it’s probably smart to pay close attention to anything named after Dr. King.

After heading north, I turned east on Olympic Boulevard and almost lost my transmission. They could turn that stretch of Olympic into an adventure park for off-road vehicles. I didn’t report any of this, because I wouldn’t have known where to begin.

I did call 311 again from the Eastside, though, when I nearly lost a wheel in a water-filled pothole that looked like a small lake. It was on Short Street between Boyle and Soto, wide and deep enough to have its own “Baywatch” crew.

After that, I headed downtown and reported a bad patch on Spring Street, just north of City Hall, and another at 1st and Main, across the street from Hahn’s office.

The latter wasn’t exactly a pothole, I told the operator, but a deep rut with high walls on both sides. It looked like a bobsled run.

Potholes are everywhere, the operator said. They’re on every street in the city.

This one’s right outside the mayor’s office, I said, telling her he could see it if he looked out the window.

You could look out any window in the city and see a pothole, she said.

She must be working for Villaraigosa.

In all, Joe Voter reported 10 pothole locations Wednesday. Because I’m such a nice guy, I gave Hahn 48 hours to get the job done, rather than 24. On Friday, I revisited each site, and I’m guessing the findings will not be posted on Slim Jim’s campaign website.

They didn’t fill them all.

They didn’t even fill half of them.

Are you ready for this?

They got to only one of the 10 locations.

Promises, promises.

The 10th one was being filled by a two-man crew as I arrived on the scene. It was in Brentwood, if you needed any more proof that it pays to have the right address. I told the crew I had reported the pothole 48 hours earlier, not 24.

“Is your last name Voter?” one of them asked.

They showed me a work order, referred by a certain Joseph Voter.

They’re moving as fast as they can and putting in overtime, the two men told me, but the backlog is a killer.

They said they’re the only two guys on pothole duty between the San Diego Freeway and Pacific Coast Highway, north to Mulholland and south to Pico.

So what gives, Mayor Hahn?

He said he’d already admitted that the 24-hour pledge came with an asterisk, thanks to record rainfall and a record number of potholes.

That’s the trouble with Hahn’s emphasis on pothole politics. You can fall into one and disappear.

“I know we’d like to fix them in 24 hours,” said Hahn, who’s trying to scare up more overtime money for work crews, “but we’re going to have to just fix them as fast as we can.”

At least he knows better, the mayor told me, than to repeat the pledge his father made many years ago at campaign time.

Kenny Hahn used to promise a dollar to anyone who could find a pothole.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com.