Yellowknife (Apr 17/06) - With spring comes pothole season and the running battles city crews wage on the pesky sinkholes.

Cabbie Elyas Elyas said the city did a great job clearing snow this winter, but gives lower marks for how they've handled the pothole problem.

City workers Norm Smith, left, and Darryl Sweetman shovel asphalt into a large pothole on Franklin Avenue Thursday. - Chris Windeyer/NNSL photo

"They fix them at the wrong time: rush hour," he said.

Cab driver Vaughan del Valle said roads near commercial and residential areas off Old Airport Road are the worst in the city, although "on the highway there's some you don't see coming."

Elyas says taxis take a beating from the potholes and damage to tires and shock absorbers is most common. That takes an economic toll on cab drivers, he said.

"We depend on the roads. We're on the roads 12 hours a day."

It's something Dennis Althouse, superintendent of operations and maintenance at the city's Department of Public Works, has heard many times before.

"We're always going to have complainers, that's just human nature," Althouse said. "The thing is, we're caught in the middle between we want to have perfect roads and people who don't want to pay more taxes."

While he couldn't provide specific figures, Althouse said the city spends on average between $300,000 and $400,000 a year on materials and labour for pothole repair. This year is no worse than any other, he said.

City workers Norm Smith and Darryl Sweetman spent most of Thursday morning filling in a massive pothole on Franklin Avenue, near Forrest Drive.

The hole is as wide as a small car and the work is slowed down by the fact that the asphalt has frozen into one big, black lump in the back of the city works pickup truck.

Smith and Sweetman use a torch to melt off chunks of asphalt.

Sweetman estimates city crews will be back at the spot in a week or so because the thawing and buckling combined with heavy traffic will pop the new mass of replacement asphalt out of the ground "like a cork."

"This time of year it's all temporary," Sweetman said.

That's public works in the Arctic, although Althouse said crews try to fix the potholes properly the first time.

As for the traffic headaches that inevitably come with roadwork, he said drivers have a choice.

"That's kind of a pain for the public to have to slim down to one lane of traffic for an afternoon or they can sit there and swear at the pothole for the rest of the summer."