On the late morning of March 26, a City of Santa Fe truck carrying asphalt turned off Early Street to Topeka Street, slowly inching along the approximately 350-foot road as a few street maintenance crew members walked behind it, directing when it should stop and go.
Every time they tell the driver to stop, it’s because they’ve found another pothole to fill. At this small street off Cerrillos Road, connecting Early and Gilmore streets, SFR counted at least 13.
According to Ralph Lopez, who works on the city’s street maintenance asphalt crew, Topeka Street is “light” in pothole density.
Celso Lovato, another street maintenance crew member, tells SFR, “Yesterday, we did only half of Fifth Street, and there were at least 200 potholes that we covered from Siringo [Road] to St. Michael’s [Drive].”
After shoveling asphalt into the potholes, smoothing it over to be even with the rest of the road and compacting it, another truck behind the crew slowly runs over the pothole.
“That way, it binds and it packs together better,” Lovato says. “A lot of people are always worried about [asphalt] sticking to their tires. Once we lay it down, it's ready to go, to drive over.”
These repairs to potholes on Topeka Street were part of a larger project within Santa Fe known as Pothole Palooza, in which the entire street maintenance team collaborates to fill in as many potholes across the city as they can within a two-week period.
“All day long, every day, last weekend, this week—all they're doing is potholes, every single person,” says Regina Wheeler, Santa Fe’s public works director. “Usually we have people out there doing street sweeping, and people out there grading dirt roads and we have people out there clearing culverts, but these two weeks, everybody does potholes.”
This spring’s Pothole Palooza concluded on Friday, and Lopez reports the street maintenance team has filled in more than 1,500 potholes in total.
Lopez estimates about 10% of the potholes they fill as being CRMs, which are requests submitted from residents. The other 90%, the crews find themselves.
“We're pretty proactive on it. I mean, [our CRM list] is updated weekly,” Lopez says.
Lopez says the city hosts Pothole Palooza events a few times a year, typically toward the end of winter and during monsoon season, and adds that he appreciates the extra help of street maintenance workers from other divisions, as the asphalt crew has only two regular crew members. He adds that while the asphalt crew has four vacancies, ideally, he would love for the asphalt crew to have 10 more employees.
“When we do the Pothole Palooza, we get the opportunity for the other guys to come in and help us,” Lopez says. “We all come in as a group, as a department, to kind of tackle it and get ahead, because it is a lot, for two guys.”
According to Wheeler, there are a total of 30 employees working in street maintenance, which includes drainage, concrete, asphalt, sweeping and grading. This division of public works has
nine vacancies within street maintenance, and Wheeler adds that CDL drivers are “in high demand in so many industries.”
Although the street maintenance team has just completed this year’s first Pothole Palooza, Wheeler says the public works department’s 2025 season of road paving projects is only getting started. Wheeler says these paving projects are typically done by contractors rather than city teams because “the city does not have that giant equipment to mill and pave roadways.”
The largest project, which Wheeler says is set to complete in June this year, is the federally funded Guadalupe Street Project, which began a year and a half ago and is set to redesign the street with 10-foot sidewalks, changes to intersections, bicycle lanes, medians and a reduction in travel lanes.
Rachel Mills
“The feds audit us on our progress and our performance on that project, and we've passed every single audit. We're completely on schedule,” Wheeler says. “We have even overcome some unexpected discoveries during the process ... the feds have given us extra funding to cover the cost to those, and we haven't added any scheduled time.”
The city has made headway on its many road-improvement projects to be completed throughout the spring and the summer. Already, the team has completed milling Sandoval Street, which temporarily shut down the downtown road before it reopened.
“This pavement rehabilitation work moves much more quickly—we milled all of that Sandoval [Street] leg in one day, and then we paved it [March 24],” Wheeler says. “So those projects move really, really fast. We try to keep the Orange Barrel Report up to date, but it's like a day-to-day kind of thing.”
The Orange Barrel Report is a quick resource that gives the public information about new, ongoing and recently completed construction projects in the city that impact traffic, which can be accessed at santafenm.gov/orangebarrel. Wheeler says it updates “at least weekly,” although the city has been pushing to bring its updates closer to daily.
Wheeler notes that when the city receives its paving funds every year, they are distributed equally among the districts, and are typically targeted at streets with dense amounts of potholes, which the city tracks from road assessments and constituent complaints.
