- Alachua County allocates $106 million in the 2026-2027 budget to address a decades-long backlog in road resurfacing and pothole repairs.
- The county increased pothole crews, added workdays, and plans a call center to handle a surge in public repair requests.
- County officials emphasize short-term pothole fixes but advocate milling and resurfacing as the only permanent road repair solution.
Alachua County continues shifting resources to address its 700-mile roadway system, a decades-long backlog in resurfacing and public submissions for pothole repairs.
At its Tuesday meeting, County Manager Michele Lieberman updated the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) on the county’s efforts. The update came at the end of the afternoon agenda and before the evening vote for a 2026-2027 county budget that includes $106 million for roads.
“This is a crisis, and we are taking it as such,” Lieberman said.
The new and potential efforts include a $500,000 budget amendment for more pothole repairs, paying public works crews of neighboring governments to work overtime on county roads, establishing a call center, adding milling and resurfacing to a contract with Watson Construction and ordering rock asphalt to use when regular hot asphalt is unavailable.
Lieberman said staff have been inundated with calls, emails and submissions to the new Pothole Portal, pushing the county to prepare a potential third-party call center to help collect and sort the information. She said the county is ready to set up the call center within days and that staff is analyzing the current call load to establish effective hours for the center.
Alachua County has reached out to neighboring counties and cities to see if they would be interested in agreements to pay for their public works staff to assist in pothole repair. The county recently increased to four pothole crews and added an extra two days to the work week, allowing patching to happen from Monday through Saturday.
However, repair work is dependent on weather and equipment availability. Lieberman said equipment issues kept the crews off the streets for an entire week recently.
She also addressed a pothole crew that was found to be dumping unused asphalt into the woods in June. She said employees are expected to do their job and management is responsible for reacting promptly, which she said happened in this case. New checks have been put in place to prevent similar breaches.
Lieberman said the hot asphalt isn’t always available, so the county has started purchasing rock asphalt. She said the county tested the rock asphalt last year, and while more expensive and less effective, Lieberman said staff considers it worth the cost to keep pothole crews running instead of standing down for lack of materials.
The county also switched back to filling individual potholes instead of cutting large rectangles and pouring asphalt into the area. But staff are supposed to fill all the patching issues along the road instead of leaving major potholes unfixed just feet away from where another was repaired.
Commissioner Anna Prizzia said she has a slight concern about trying to tackle the backlog of potholes with quickness instead of quality. She said she’d hate to see the county reduce the level of service for speed even though speed is of the essence.
Earlier in the meeting, Prizzia addressed the county’s roads.
“It’s really an unfortunate situation that we’re in. We have very very limited resources to cover all the roads that we have in our county,” Prizzia said.
Even so, Chair Ken Cornell pointed to a $106 million figure highlighted in the 2026-2027 fiscal year that will be spent on roads. He said that’s the most in decades, with Prizzia adding that it’s the most ever.
That number includes $26 million in general fund revenue plus gas tax ($14.9 million) and the infrastructure surtax.
Lieberman explained that the pothole repair is a short-term improvement while the pavement management system is a long-term solution.
Public Works Director Ramon Gavarette said the only way to fix the roads permanently is to mill and resurface. Putting a chip seal on top of asphalt is a temporary fix, but the cracks and damage from the underlying asphalt will work up onto the new surface.
Prizzia said the problem of managing calls and figuring out which sections of roads have already been flagged by citizens is a job that artificial intelligence should be able to handle.
Commissioner Mary Alford said citizens also need to know that calling every day, or multiple times a day, about the same pothole will only slow down the system.
For more information on the backlog of roadway repairs and the condition of Alachua County’s roads, check out this article from August.