The Towns That Voted to Fix Their Roads Before Building New Ones

Callow Vale is one of three districts in the northern province—the others are Brennock, a market town of 22,000 on the river plain, and Easterholt, a fast-growing ring of commuter villages south of Norhaven—whose voters adopted what has come to be called the maintenance covenant.^* Its terms fit on a single page. No district money may be spent on a new road, or on widening an old one, until fewer than 8 percent of the district’s roads are rated poor or very poor in the province’s annual condition survey. Certified safety works are exempt, and so are roads paid for entirely by developers. The covenant runs for 10 years and can be undone only by another vote.

Six years on, the backlog across the three districts has fallen by nearly two-thirds.2 That is the number the covenant’s supporters lead with, and it is true. But the more interesting story is what the rule did to the people who govern roads. The ribbon-cutting is the oldest transaction in local politics: a politician spends money, a road appears, a photograph proves it. Take away the ribbon and you find out what else a councilor can be rewarded for—and what they will do to get the ribbon back.

The arithmetic of decay

Sander Ivers has kept the same spreadsheet since 2008. He is the district engineer for Brennock, a tall, unhurried man of 57 who wears a high-visibility vest the way other men wear a cardigan, and the file—he calls it the register—holds one row for each of the district’s 1,284 road segments, with columns for surface age, traffic, drainage, the date of every repair, and a condition score from zero to 100. Each June the province sends a van fitted with lasers and cameras down every public road in the north. Each July, Ivers checks its numbers against his own notes, updates his rows by hand, and colors them in.3

“A road doesn’t fail,” he said, scrolling. “It gets tired, and then it gets expensive.” Asphalt oxidizes in sunlight and turns brittle. Brittle asphalt cracks. Water finds the cracks, and in the north, where the temperature crosses freezing on perhaps 80 nights a winter, water that enters a crack in November will have levered it open by March.4 A hairline becomes a crazed patch that engineers call alligator cracking, then a pothole, and then—if the stone foundation underneath stays soaked for long enough—a road that has to be dug out to half a meter and rebuilt.

The price climbs at every stage. Ivers’s figures for a typical rural road in Brennock: about 21,000 crowns a kilometer to seal the surface with a spray of binder and stone chippings while the road is still sound; roughly 96,000 to plane off and replace the top layer once it has begun to crack; 430,000 to reconstruct it once the foundation has gone. Across 17 years of his records, every crown spent treating a road at the right moment avoided, on average, 5.70 crowns of work later.^† “It is the least controversial finding in civil engineering,” he said. “Every road engineer in the world knows it. Every finance committee in the world forgets it by the following spring.”

The forgetting is not stupidity. It is arithmetic of a different kind. Sealing a road that looks fine produces nothing anyone can see, while a new road produces a road. Between 2010 and 2019 the three districts built 41 kilometers of new carriageway—a bypass, two link roads, the Fellgate approach—while the share of their existing network rated poor climbed from 14 percent to 23 percent. By Ivers’s estimate, each new kilometer commits a district to about 6,800 crowns a year of upkeep in perpetuity. Every new kilometer is a promise to pay forever, made by people who will not be in office when the bill comes.

The campaign for the covenant was started by two people who agreed on almost nothing else. Clemency Hart, who chairs the Brennock Ratepayers’ Association, is a retired insurance actuary who regards unfunded liabilities the way other people regard damp. Judit Farkas, a retired biology teacher, rides a steel touring bicycle 40 kilometers a week and wanted fewer new roads for reasons that had nothing to do with money. They met at a council meeting in 2018, where each had come to complain about the same hole on Mill Lane.5 “Clemency wanted to stop the spending and I wanted to stop the tarmac,” Farkas said. “It took us an hour in the café to realize it was the same sentence.”

Losing the scissors

The measure went before voters in all three districts on the same Sunday in October 2020. Brennock passed it comfortably, with 61 percent. Easterholt passed it with 54 percent. In Callow Vale it scraped through with 52.3 percent, after a campaign in which the mayor warned that a rural district with 780 kilometers of road and 14,800 people to pay for them would never get under the threshold, and so would never be allowed to build anything again.

Her objection was not frivolous. Callow Vale had spent a decade planning a four-kilometer link from the upper valley to the creamery at Fellgate, which would have cut 22 minutes from the milk-tanker run and taken the tankers off a single-track lane through two hamlets. The province had promised half the cost. “People in Brennock can afford to be purists about roads,” she said during the campaign. “They’ve got plenty.” Rural districts, she argued, had always been told to wait—for broadband, for buses, for a doctor who stayed longer than two years—and now they were being invited to vote to wait for roads too.

The first year bore her out. Freed from capital projects, the three districts tried to spend their road budgets on repair all at once and discovered there was almost nobody to do it. Surfacing crews in the north were booked solid through the summer of 2021, and tender prices for surface dressing rose 18 percent in a single season. The backlog fell by 31 kilometers, barely more than the length of road that slid into the poor category that year anyway. In March 2021, Callow Vale’s council formally shelved the creamery link. Halloran voted with the majority—“the law was the law”—then drove home and, by her own account, spoke to no one for the rest of the evening.

What changed her mind was not an argument. It was a pile of letters. Every district in the province pays compensation when a defect in its roads damages a vehicle, and in Callow Vale every settlement letter crosses the mayor’s desk. In 2019 she signed 412 of them: burst tires, cracked wheel rims, a broken axle on a horsebox, a milk tanker that lost its wing mirror on the same hedge three times. By 2023 the number had fallen to 140. Last year it was 61. “I used to sign them every Friday,” she said. “Sorry about your tire. Sorry about your wheel. Sorry about your horse’s nerves. And one Friday there weren’t any, and I realized I didn’t know when it had stopped.”

Other things had stopped, too. The school-bus contractor dropped a surcharge it had added to its invoices in 2018 for what it called road-surface wear. The gritting trucks, which used to skip the upper Drover’s Road in hard winters because its edges had crumbled into the ditch, have run it every frosty night since the edges were rebuilt in 2022. The district’s two road crews, who had spent most of their working lives filling the same holes, began working down a planned list rather than a complaints log. When I asked Halloran what she had expected to lose, she answered before I had finished the question. “I thought I was losing the scissors. What I was losing was the excuse.”

Where the photographs went

Politicians are adaptable, and the councilors of the three districts did not go without a photograph for long. In Brennock’s 2024 district election, the first held under the covenant, both of the main groups on the council campaigned on the repair rate. One published a monthly tally of kilometers resurfaced; the other promised to clear the backlog a year sooner. The winning leaflet featured not a road but a chart. Ivers, who had drawn the chart, found this unsettling. “I had always assumed nobody would read it,” he said.

Councilors began holding what they called pothole surgeries: Saturday-morning walks along a street in their ward, at which residents pointed out defects and the councilor sprayed a white circle around each one for the crews.6 One Brennock councilor told me the walks routinely drew four times as many people as her formal advice sessions. “Nobody comes to talk about the budget,” she said. “Everybody comes to show you a hole.”

Something more durable happened in the council chambers. Under the old system the road budget was settled in two parts: a capital program, fought over line by line as each councilor tried to land a project in their ward, and a maintenance line, set at whatever was left. The covenant fused the two. With no new road to fight over, the only way to win was to clear the backlog faster, so that new roads could be funded again. Councilors who had spent years trimming the maintenance line began voting to raise it. Combined road spending in the three districts rose from 21.6 million crowns in 2019 to 29 million in 2023, every crown of it on repair.

A thousand small invoices

The money had to go somewhere, and where it went reshaped the province’s road industry. Before 2020 the big contracts in the north—bypasses, link roads, bridge approaches—tended to go to Halvard Civil, a regional firm with 600 employees, its own asphalt plant, and a practiced eye for the kind of tender that ends with a ribbon. Maintenance went to small local firms in small parcels: a few hundred meters of patching here, a blocked culvert there.

Colm Ruddick runs one of those firms, from a yard on the edge of Brennock where his grandfather once parked coal lorries. In 2019 Ruddick Surfacing had nine employees and one chip spreader; today it has 26 employees and three spreaders. “For 40 years the work came in buckets,” he said. “A job in May, a job in August, and you laid lads off in October.” What mattered, he said, was less the covenant than what Ivers did with it. In 2022 the engineer persuaded all three districts to tender their surfacing as joint five-year framework contracts, so that firms could see far enough ahead to buy machines and train crews. Tender prices, which had spiked in the first summer, had fallen back below their 2020 level by 2023.

“A new road is one big invoice and a photograph,” Ruddick said. “Maintenance is a thousand small invoices and nobody ever thanks you. Turns out the thousand small invoices are the better business, as long as someone promises you they’re coming.”

Halvard bid on almost none of it for two years. “A five-kilometer resurfacing job is not interesting to a firm built to move a hillside,” said its regional director, Pieter Vos, who is candid that his company opposed the covenant and still considers it a mistake. Halvard’s case, which deserves a hearing, is that new roads are where a region’s productivity comes from: a bypass that saves a haulier 15 minutes a run, multiplied across 20 years and thousands of runs, is worth more than any number of smooth back lanes. In 2023 the company opened a maintenance division anyway. It now employs 70 people. “We don’t have to like the weather,” Vos said. “We do have to dress for it.”

What the backers didn’t expect

Clemency Hart expected the covenant to cut spending. It raised spending by a third. She has made a kind of peace with that—the extra money paid down an old liability rather than creating a new one, she says—but the pace unsettles her. “We wanted discipline,” she said. “What we got was a sprint. They’re pouring money into repair so they can get back to building, and when they get back to building I’m not sure they’ll remember why we stopped.”

Judit Farkas has a different complaint: smooth roads are fast roads. On the 60 kilometers of rural road resurfaced in Brennock since 2021, the province’s traffic counters recorded average speeds rising by six kilometers an hour. The district has since spent part of its repair budget on speed tables and narrowed junctions, which some councilors call a betrayal of the covenant and Farkas calls its completion. “I campaigned for fewer new roads,” she said. “I did not campaign for the old ones to become racetracks.”

The sharpest criticism concerns how Callow Vale brought its numbers down. In 2022 the district handed 46 kilometers of little-used lanes back to the farms they served, reclassifying them as private tracks and paying each farm a one-off 9,000 crowns per kilometer. Twenty-nine of those kilometers were rated poor or worse, so a single council vote cut Callow Vale’s backlog by more than a tenth without a shovel touching the ground. The provincial audit office noticed. Its 2024 review found the transfers lawful but calculated that without them, the district’s reported backlog would have been nearly four percentage points higher.^‡

Halloran does not apologize. “Those were driveways with a road sign on them,” she said. “We were maintaining people’s farm tracks out of everyone’s rates and calling it a network.” Then, after a pause: “It also helped. I won’t pretend it didn’t help.” Farkas, who counts Halloran as the covenant’s most useful convert, calls the transfers the one part of the story that smells.

The most serious case against the covenant comes from Easterholt, and it is made by Benedikt Strand, a councilor for the village of Lindby, who opposed the rule in 2020 and has not changed his mind. Lindby sits where two provincial roads cross, and about 1,100 heavy vehicles a day squeeze through its main street.7 A bypass designed in 2017 was to be 60 percent funded by the province. Because the covenant barred Easterholt from paying its share, the provincial money lapsed in 2022 and was reallocated to a district in the south. In March 2025, Easterholt voted on an amendment to exempt the Lindby bypass. It failed, 48 percent to 52.

“We have fixed every pothole in Lindby,” Strand said, standing outside that bakery as a timber lorry ground by close enough to touch. “The lorries are very grateful.” His argument is that the covenant was written for places that have stopped growing. Easterholt’s population has risen 19 percent since 2015; developers have built 1,400 homes there under the exemption for privately funded roads, and each estate comes with streets the district will eventually be asked to adopt and maintain. He has a line he uses at every public meeting, and he used it on me: “Fix it first is a fine slogan for a place that’s finished. We’re not finished. We’re just not allowed to say so.”

Ivers concedes the point about the estates and has started tracking them on a separate tab: 23 kilometers of private estate road in Easterholt that will, within a decade, be offered to the district for adoption. “The covenant counts the roads we own,” he said. “It doesn’t count the ones that are coming.”

The first ribbon

On June 9 this year, the province’s survey van finished its run through Brennock. In July, Ivers opened the results and colored them in. Of the district’s roads, 7.4 percent were rated poor or worse.^§ For the first time since the vote, Brennock was allowed to build.

What it chose to build says something about what six years had done to its council. There was no shortage of proposals: a relief road, a widened junction on the ring road, a second entrance to the industrial estate. The council picked the smallest, a 1.1-kilometer road to the new health center on the town’s eastern edge, which patients currently reach by a detour through a housing estate. Then it attached a condition nobody had asked for. Every new kilometer the district builds must now come with a maintenance reserve, set aside on the day construction is approved, large enough to resurface it twice. For the health-center road, that came to 211,000 crowns.

The ribbon was cut on September 18 by the council leader, in front of about 40 people, a brass band of 11, and the photographer from the valley weekly, who asked him to do it twice.8 Clemency Hart was there and approved of the reserve. Judit Farkas was somewhere south of Norhaven on her bicycle and sent a message hoping the road would have a speed table. Ivers did not attend. He was out on the ring road with a clipboard, looking at a stretch that had turned from green to amber in the June survey. “It’ll want sealing next summer,” he said. “If we do it then, it’s 21,000 a kilometer. If we leave it, you know the rest.”

Callow Vale is not there yet. The June survey put its backlog at 9.6 percent, and the district expects to cross the line next year or the year after. The creamery link will not be built; the provincial money has gone, and the creamery has since merged with a rival and moved its collection depot out of the valley. Halloran has stopped mourning it. When the district does cross the threshold, she has already decided what she will do with the scissors.

She will unwrap them from the tea towel and drive up the Drover’s Road, which had its edges rebuilt in 2022 and its surface sealed this summer, and which has not produced a compensation claim in two years. Somewhere above the cattle grid, where the view opens out over the whole valley, she will stretch a ribbon between two fence posts and cut it. “Not to open anything,” she said. “It’s been open for 200 years. That’s the point. I want one photograph in that drawer of a road that just stayed good.”