If you don’t address a problem, fixing it will never get cheaper. That’s true for a home, vehicle, business and, yes, our local streets.

Our 1A reporting this week includes a pavement management update provided by a citizen committee to the Town Council. You should read the full story to get a proper grasp of the situation but (and this should come as no surprise if you’ve been following this issue for the past decade or so), local streets are deteriorating and we are not putting aside enough money each year to keep up with the growing backlog.

There are a couple of ways to address this issue. We can either try and find the millions of extra dollars needed each year for proper upkeep in the existing budget or we can find new ways (property tax, bond) to fund the work.

But, again, if you’ve followed the streets issue over the years, you’ll know that local voters don’t appear too keen to actually fork over additional money to have those nice streets we demand. Not in a manner that lasts, anyway.

We’ve heard a lot of talk about making do with what we have, but nobody seems to have an answer as to how that can actually be accomplished. If we’re not willing to pay for the upkeep ourselves, we have to ask ourselves what we’re willing to cut.

Town staff was whittled down years ago, so don’t expect to find millions of extra dollars by consolidating that already strained workforce.

Folks regularly speak out in our letters about money being wasted on studies, but those studies are necessary to properly tackle projects. It goes back to that old saying, “measure twice, cut once.”

That leads us to flat-out cutting projects. While some of the ideas our Town Council kicks around are nice-to-haves more than needs, it’s unlikely there are enough non-necessary projects in our annual budget to knock a sizable dent in the amount needed to fix our roads.

So, then we talk about cutting back on activities, programs and the like. Ignoring the fact all of the Town’s annual events combined likely would not reach the dollar value necessary to take care of our 3.6 million square yards of pavement, are we really ready to become Fountain Hills: The Town Where Nothing Gets Built and Nothing Ever Happens?

If we want to properly maintain our community, the funding has to come from somewhere. And if we’re willing to drastically cut back on projects and events, are we even a “community” anymore?

We need answers and we need to agree on them soon. Remember, the price tag is only going to continue to go up.