Why I let Domino’s fill Milford, Delaware’s potholes

When I moved to Delaware two and a half years ago, I was impressed by the quality of the infrastructure, including the relative lack of potholes. I had most recently worked as a city manager in northeast Ohio — a region known for tough, cold winters with lake effect snow and endless potholes. There, we knew how hard it was to keep ahead in the never-ending race to fix our streets with limited resources.

I was told that being positioned between the Delaware and Chesapeake bays, our peninsula had more moderate weather. Then three weeks into my new job, a nor’easter hit Delaware, bringing snow, winds, flooding and cold temperatures. And that meant potholes.

Over the next two years, I learned more about the infrastructure needs of Milford (approximately 10,000 residents) and the funding mechanisms we had available. While some streets in Milford are maintained by the state, the majority are the city’s responsibility. Deferred maintenance meant that about half were rated in fair, poor, very poor or serious condition.

While Ohioans have, in my experience, greater sensitivity to street maintenance, Delawareans are no less upset when a truck rumbles over a pothole near their house and wakes them up. But Delaware also prides itself on being a low-tax state, and that has attracted many residents over the years who expect excellent services with low taxes and rare, if ever, tax increases.

So when I learned in the winter that Domino’s was offering checks to municipalities to repair their potholes as part of a marketing campaign, I quickly responded.

We worked with Domino’s ad agency to ensure the city would be portrayed in a positive light (not as some pothole-infested place you’d never want to visit) and to address any ethical concerns (we are not endorsing any particular brand of pizza). Our role was easy. In exchange for a $5,000 check, Domino’s wanted photos — before and after shots.

They didn’t want to send a video crew. They didn’t want high-resolution photos. They wanted cellphone shots of a bunch of guys patching potholes. The work was fun for our maintenance team: They added the tagline and Domino’s logo in spray chalk, and in two weeks, more than 40 potholes of different sizes were patched.

Many of us are more familiar with business-to-business promotions (like showing your baseball ticket for a discount at a restaurant), but rarely has a business directly invested in making our infrastructure better through an ad campaign.

Domino’s campaign has sparked interesting commentary. One critic called it “a sign of both how horribly infrastructure has crumbled in America and how much power we have ceded corporations,” while another likened it to the trend of “funding our health care through GoFundMe.”

But we saw this as a positive for our community. $5,000 is not a small amount of money relative to our budget for street repairs. Our general fund budget is $9 million, more than half of which funds our police department. In many communities, there’s constant competition between paying for police and everything else. Milford is no different.

There are people in this country who think government wastes money. But I treat city tax dollars as if they were my own, and I encourage city employees to do the same. Get three bids on every project, three quotes on every purchase. Turn off the lights. Be good stewards. Taking $5,000 from a pizza chain to repair our roads was not a difficult decision.

If there’s one thing most governments have a harder time funding than street repairs, it’s marketing and promotion. I’m willing to bet that many Americans would have a hard time finding our small state on a map. It would be harder still to locate Milford. So I’m also hoping that this campaign brings more awareness to the great state of Delaware and to what we’re accomplishing

My job as a professional local government manager is to identify the best alternatives to providing crucial city services. Sometimes that means creative financing. And sometimes that means letting Domino’s pick up the tab.

This story was originally published June 16, 2018 at 8:36 PM with the headline "Why I let Domino’s fill Milford, Delaware’s potholes."