LEWISTON – Dwindling road repair money could mean city crews spend more time patching potholes this summer and less time elsewhere.

The city is expecting less help from the state for road maintenance next year. Public Works Director Paul Boudreau said he expects state aid to drop from $498,000 this year to $230,000 in 2008. State officials said Lewiston’s share shouldn’t be that much smaller than it is this year.

Even so, Boudreau said rising repair costs eat up more of his budget.

“You have to consider the fact that road repairs are more expensive because of high oil prices and we’re in a pinch,” he said. “It means simply we don’t have the money to do the kind of repairs we need to do. All we can afford are patches, and that’s not what I consider proper maintenance.”

When he talks about proper maintenance, Boudreau focuses on River Road, which runs from downtown to the municipal landfill, along the Androscoggin River. City road crews rebuilt that road 30 years ago.

“They went down to the gravel,” Boudreau said. They regraded the road, put down new gravel and layers of fresh new asphalt.

It wasn’t cheap. The work cost almost $1 million to reconstruct three-quarters of a mile. But today, 30 years later, that road looks almost as good as it did then.

“It needs some work now, in places, but it’s in remarkable shape overall,” he said. That’s despite years of pounding from heavy trash trucks trundling back and forth, as well as the city’s public works dump trucks, loaders and plows in recent years.

“They say doing a full depth reconstruction costs $1 million a mile, but I think that underestimates the cost,” Boudreau said. It’s still more than his entire annual road maintenance budget.

“So you do more patching,” he said. “You put down a top coat and fill in the potholes. But that gives you a year or two at best, before you have to do it again.”

Boudreau blames oil prices. They’ve pushed the cost of asphalt up for the last five years. But they’ve also led to higher prices at the fuel pump, which means less driving. Since the state roads budget gets it’s money from the gasoline tax, it means less money for road repairs.

Fred Hutchinson, the Maine Department of Transportation administrator for Urban-Rural Initiative Program, said it’s not just Lewiston’s concern.

“All you have to do is read the paper to realize municipalities across the country are worried about road spending,” he said. “The costs go up, but the money doesn’t.”

But Hutchinson said neither he nor Boudreau will know how much they’ll get until the state Legislature approves the Maine DOT’s budget. Lewiston received $523,000 in fiscal 2006 and $498,000 this fiscal year.

“This year, if we get $230,000, we’ll be golden,” Boudreau said. “That’s the only way I can look at it.”

Herb Thomson of the Maine Department of Transportation said Lewiston’s share of state roads money should be close to what it received this year.

“But we won’t know for sure until the Legislature decides,” he said.