Before April showers can bring May flowers, February snowstorms bring March potholes – and lots of them. As the snow covering the Northeast melts, local public works departments are busy patching up roads throughout the region.
Around 120 people work for Saratoga Springs DPW – and a most-hands-on-deck operation to control the pothole scourge begins around the start of March.
“You’re going to have good days and you’re going to have bad days. Some days are going to be super busy, some days are going to be chill. Some days you’re going to have nothing but happy people especially when the sun is shining but if there’s a storm or if it’s raining you have a lot of upset people depending on what the issue or crisis is at the time,” said Rhonda McGourty.
DPW Dispatch Supervisor Rhonda McGourty says she has learned in the 18 years she’s coordinated the real-time response to citizen complaints to take angry calls in stride.
“My first year of being a dispatcher I really took a lot of things personally and I felt responsible for all of that stuff and now I try to not feel responsible and try to put the responsibility on the shoulders of other, because we actually have people out there doing the work,” said McGourty.
When someone calls blaming a flat tire on a pothole, McGourty is the one who picks up and sends out a crew.
Today, DPW Deputy Commissioner Tad Roemer is tagging along.
“The equipment is so big and cumbersome and slow-moving, we always try to group the streets together. If we can move the paving equipment from one location to the other without having to get it on a truck, which moves about one mile an hour, that really helps. It’s a little inefficient to start and stop and do small stretches,” said Roemer.
This time of year, before asphalt plants are up and running, local crews can run two kinds of patches: hot and cold.
“Well, they swept it out already and now they’re grabbing the material out of this machine that heats up all night long and they’re going to fill the hole and smash it down with that tamper. It’ll hold up until it rains again or we plow snow. It will hold up, it’s all weather dependent,” said Ray Green.
Ray Green is one of two on-hand street supervisors. Right now, his crew is hot-patching a series of potholes just south of Congress Park.
The crew shovels steaming heaps of black goo out of a machine towed behind their truck – it’s essentially an orange asphalt oven on wheels that heats the material up overnight so it’s ready for a morning patch run.
Once the asphalt is in place, the crew smooths it down and sweeps away any lose chunks.
“Water is the biggest issue, gotta get that out of there and dry them up as best you can. Until the plant opens where get the real good material it’s kind of temporary,” said Green.
At the state level, the New York State Department of Transportation reports it repaired more than 4,000 miles of highway and filled 1.3 million potholes in 2025.
J.J. Nichols has been with the Saratoga Springs DPW for nearly 35 years. He says this part of his job is mostly a battle against mother nature.
“Until it gets warmer, until the ground gets warmer [asphalt] doesn’t adhere. It doesn’t stick. And then as soon as it rains the water gets back underneath it and peels it right back up,” said Nichols.
Nichols adds until a road gets totally repaved, there’s only so much his crews can do.
“That’s what I try to tell Ted [Roemer] he wants to pave this, he wants to pave everything, which is great, but you can’t ever do it. We don’t have enough money, not enough time, and there’s always more. It’s like a puzzle. In the summer time this is how I always look at it, I told Tad this, we start doing potholes, by the end of the year we pretty much got them all. It’s like a big puzzle, just put all the pieces together and we catch up, usually. A lot of people don’t understand it that its—I wish it would stay, I wish the road would be as smooth as can be,” said Nichols.
The city’s DPW employees work hard, but just as mother nature can render their work undone, there are other things outside their control.
With Jason Golub leaving his role as DPW Commissioner in August 2024, the city’s second-largest department has had three different department leaders in recent years. Democrat BK Keramati won the seat in November’s election and will head the department through 2027.
Nichols, says commissioners come and go with the seasons, just the same as the potholes. His crews patch it all up just the same.
“I mean, Saratoga’s changing. This ain’t Saratoga like it used to be when I was a kid. So, it’s always going to change. But as long as you have good leaders, everybody wants what’s best for the town. Nobody wants it to fail. Whoever is in there always wants to do good. Nobody wants to be, ‘you’re the one that let Saratoga turn into crap. So, I think it’ll always be good. It’s defiantly different from Tommy McTygue days and even Skip Scirocco, it’s always changing,” said Nichols.
