By Juan Nava

I have lived in McFarland all my life. Ever since I could remember the streets have been messed up; they have a lot of potholes and loose gravel everywhere. The streets have been messed up for a long time and I think that it is time to fix them. 

The time to fix them is now because it will bring many problems to the community if we don’t do anything about it. It will bring problems because it’s annoying when you are driving with bumps and holes on every street. It makes neighborhoods look poor and unpresentable. Not only does this make our city look unpresentable but it reflects badly on it.

When traveling to another city or town we would rather be welcomed by a clean healthy environment rather than a polluted and unprofessional-looking place. By fixing the streets this could help prevent accidents and will make streets look cleaner and drivable. Think about all the older people driving and not being able to react fast enough to a bump or pothole mid-road. 

This can cause not only one but multiple accidents resulting in that first crash. To get more information regarding the streets Mayor Saul Ayon was interviewed to get his side of this problem. 

“I’ve been here 43 years and what happened in the last 43 years is no one would address the streets and now you see the problems we’ve had,” said Mayor Ayon.   

It hasn’t been a top priority to fix the streets and caused multiple problems these past years. This problem has been around for many years and it isn’t new to the city. Ayon also went over the cost for one street compared to multiple at a time.

“To resurface the streets from the ground up it costs $1 million,” said Ayon. 

Due to the price of fixing the streets, this doesn’t let them fix many streets at once. Due to this problem, Ayon decided to hire a professional and they were able to save a lot of money and use that money to fix one more street the next year. 

Ayon also mentioned that it takes up to one year to fix one street depending on the size of the street and how bad it is. He also mentioned that people in the community can help to keep the streets up and running by not driving heavy trucks such as semis and other big trucks. By not driving big trucks this can help because some streets are not made to support all that weight, and with the trucks driving on them it cracks the streets. 

The last thing Ayon mentioned was that people look at McFarland and see the movie he said that when you look at McFarland you look at it for what it is and the city, not the movie.