The crime rate can be way down, the city can be almost litter-free, the lines at the DMV and for summer fun registration can be magically nonexistent, but none of that matters in a voter’s assessment if there is a single ill-placed pothole. Potholes can make or break the career of a local politician.

Well, yes, trash pickup and toilet paper in beach bathrooms, too — if those things aren’t taken care of, the mayor and the City Council get an earful, to be sure. But those are secondary. Primarily, it’s potholes.

So yay for Mayor Kirk Caldwell and his team for exceeding their stated goal of repaving 1,500 lane-miles on Oahu in five years. And hooray for Caldwell’s acknowledgement that road-fixing is a never-ending civic responsibility.

Roads can’t just be paved and checked off the list. Potholes come back like a bad rash, and deferred road maintenance gets passed down to the next mayor and Council like a curse.

“Really, this should be an ongoing, forever effort, and it should never be allowed again to get to the point where it was when I came into office,” Caldwell said last week at a news conference in St. Louis Heights, where the steep neighborhood roads are getting a makeover. When Caldwell first became mayor, he awkwardly donned a hard hat and hoisted a shovel alongside a pothole crew to promise that Honolulu roads would get better. In his last year in office, he circled back to that promise.

Potholes bother voters to an almost inexplicable degree. A mild-mannered, Camry-driving, well-insured office mouse can snap, I mean totally lose his cool, if he has to weave through a street that looks like the surface of the moon.

Potholes are offensive. They may be only inches deep and a foot wide, but they might as well be black holes sucking in the goodwill of voters.

Roads that are in bad condition are easily understood, as opposed to a projection or an estimate or a promise. A pothole is either fixed or it isn’t. It is tangible evidence, a physical manifestation of a politician’s ability to get things done.

And then there’s the symbolic nature of the road that we must all travel. It is the daily slog between work and home, the path we take to deliver our children safely to school.

It is infuriating to think that our way in the world is made more treacherous by neglect. Local politicians are entrusted with keeping the basic civic infrastructure in working order so that we can do our jobs of taking care of our lives without bouncing into a gaping hole and losing two rims on the way to work.

If you can’t get it together to, at the very least, keep our path to self-reliance safe and clear, then you’re getting in the way of us taking care of our families, and that makes you the enemy.

Or OK, maybe not that epic, but potholes really make folks mad.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.