A video showing the poor condition of many of the state’s streets is making waves in Southern California. The cities and unions responsible for posting the “Bad Roads Tour 2015” video, including the California Alliance for Jobs, say they want the state to share the cost of fixing the streets.

California residents join them in stating that the declining streets, cracked and riddled with potholes, are in desperate need of attention. In Lomita, residents say their local city government is doing little to repair the bad roads themselves. “They just pour asphalt in a pothole, and that doesn’t do anything,” resident Duane DeArman said. “They need to resurface the streets.”

Officials from the Alliance say other local city governments outside of Lomita are not doing enough to address the issue either. “Seventy-three percent of the roads in the Los Angeles area are considered to be in poor condition, and the average motorist in the Los Angeles region has to pay an extra thousand dollars a year in extra vehicle maintenance, everything from alignments and new tires to serious problems because the roads are so potholed,” said John Frith of the California Alliance for Jobs.

The state legislature has been unable to agree on how to go about sharing the burden with local city governments to fix the problem, despite a special session that was called to address just that.

“The message to the legislature is that they have to do something,” Frith said. “We’ve been kicking the can down the potholed road for more than thirty years. The amount of funding going into road maintenance simply isn’t enough.” The issue of how to fund the repairs continues to be debated in Sacramento.

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