POTHOLE POLITICS OFFICIALS FIND HOLE-FIXING FULFILLING.

Byline: BRENT HOPKINS

Staff Writer

PANORAMA CITY - Steve Bruck eyed the car-maiming, jagged scar down the alley's middle, wiped his brow, and went to work.

His yellow Unibelt Asphalt Patcher had a steaming 5-ton load to wage war on the potholes that marred this quiet strip off Ranchito Avenue. Henry Magdaleno stood next to him, sweating under his hard hat. One pulled a lever, and the truck belched forth a steady stream of 250-degree asphalt into the cracked mess of the 40-year-old street.

In half an hour, the crew's asphalt Whacker had smoothed the 3-foot-by-25-foot series of craters like a Zamboni on ice. The crew raked it like a Zen garden and then pounded it flat and even.

"Henry and I take pride in this," Bruck said. "If you're going to do it, you might as well do it right. Sometimes, we'll drive by a big patch and say, 'Hey, I did that one.' It just makes you feel good."

The team from the Los Angeles Bureau of Street Services isn't the only one loving the carefully sculpted fix-ups. For a politician, the lowly pothole -- and its patch -- are pure gold.

While big, showy issues such as crime, education and economic development get mayors, council members and supervisors elected, it's the little, nagging problems such as road damage that keep them in office. What seems like a minor irritation can dramatically influence a voter's idea of how his town and the people who run it are faring.

"It cost me real money last year when I hit a pothole in Chinatown. It wrecked a tire and threw my alignment out, so I was really upset," said Thomas Hollihan, a professor who studies media and politics at the USC Annenberg School for Communications. "Potholes are a metaphor for the general decline of city services ... a metaphor for people's frustrations for living in a place that's too complex to be easily managed."

Potholes cause the average driver $671 annually in repair costs such as the ones Hollihan got stuck with, according to the city. To fix them, it dispatches 24 trucks each day to handle the calls that come in through the 311 system and hunt down other cracks on their own.

Longtime Supervisor Kenneth Hahn recognized early in his career serving the southern part of Los Angeles County that people get especially riled up about messed-up streets. Each day, he'd take a different route to work, eyeing the conditions of his constituents' roads. He boasted that he knew every hole in his district.

On weekends, he'd even pack his son, Jim, into the car and check out work throughout the area. Whenever the pair felt the distinctive ba-dunk! of wheel sucked into hole, they'd record the sites on a Dictabelt for swift maintenance.

"When he ran for election, he used to brag, 'If you can find a pothole in my district, I'll give you a dollar,'" Jim Hahn remembered. "I think he only had to pay a couple bucks for it."

These Saturday morning cruises rubbed off on young Jim, who later grew up to be L.A.'s mayor. When he wanted to bring a human touch to his administration, he frequently brought up the stories of riding around with his father. And he started his own quest to eliminate the axle-snappers.

"It's just the nuts and bolts of government," he said. "People want you to take care of the little things. I remember being criticized when I was trying to get re-elected for focusing on potholes. The same people who criticized me found they had to get out and do pothole events."

One of the biggest kneelers at the altar of road maintenance turned out to be Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Two months after he took office in 2005, he announced plans to fill 35,000 holes in a matter of weeks. Street services met the target -- and fixed an additional 15,000 for good measure. Villaraigosa challenged them to do 80,000, which they met within three months. The mayor proudly filled No.80,173 himself -- with 16 news cameras in attendance.

In July 2006, he set a goal of more than 300,000, and the department filled 307,767 -- nearly 1,400 daily. This year, on July9, he dedicated a new campaign in "Operation Pothole" to eradicate 350,000 holes in the next year.

But at the same time the mayor sought to smooth L.A.'s streets, he was digging himself out of his own hole. It was the first time he had been seen in public after several days in hiding following the disclosure of an extramarital affair.

He arrived at the event with workman's boots, gloves and vest over his usual shirt and tie. He raked, scraped and compacted away, dodging questions about his personal life and vowing to press on with civic business -- starting with the politically powerful pothole.

"He's not just going to be the politician who walks around in the nice suit and kisses babies; he's going to be the one who does real work," Villaraigosa spokesman Darryl Ryan said. "The mayor can't roll up his sleeves and build freeway space, but he can do the small things. He can go out and be with the city workers fixing the potholes."

He took that cue from Councilwoman Wendy Greuel, who attacked the lowly-but-mighty menaces early in her first term. She's been so relentless in campaigning against the problem, which she likens to graffiti, roadside trash and abandoned cars, that she earned the moniker "Pothole Queen."

Several years ago, when the mayor served on the council alongside her, he took note of her success on the streets. One day, he approached her in the City Hall garage and struck up a conversation.

"He came up and he said, 'I want to be the Pothole King,'" Greuel remembered. "I told him, 'The job is open.' And he's been doing a lot with them ever since."

The politics of the tire-poppers his crew was filling didn't matter so much to Jim Edwards, a street services supervisor watching over Bruck's and Magdaleno's project. For them, it was just another stretch of crumbling road, soon to be made whole once again.

"It's hard work, it's hot work, and people don't even notice the guys who did it," Edwards said. "But they'll notice what we did when they're driving home."

brent.hopkins(at)dailynews.com

[phone]

By the numbers

350,000: Target number of potholes for the Bureau of Street Services to fill this year.

6,000: Miles of streets in L.A.

671: Dollars spent by individual drivers because of pothole-related damage each year.

24: Trucks to tackle the problem.

24: Hours between service request and completion of job.

311: Number to call for service.

SOURCE: Daily News research

CAPTION(S):

3 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- 2; 1 color only) Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, above, has made filling potholes a priority, as did Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, below.

Andy Holzman/Staff Photographer

(3 -- color) Los Angeles Bureau of Street Services truck operator Steve Bruck rakes asphalt as he repairs potholes July 24 in an alley behind Burton Street in Panorama City.

Hans Gutknecht/Staff Photographer

Box:

By the numbers (see text)