12-Year-Old Boy Goes Viral After Trying To Fix City's Rampant Pothole Problem
When his Muskegon Heights, Michigan, street grew an abnormally large crop of spring potholes, 12-year-old Monte Scott decided getting the job done was child’s play.
So he did it himself.
Scott’s one-boy public works effort was filmed and posted in a Facebook video that shows him putting dirt from his backyard into the holes in the pavement. The video, which has been viewed more than 50,000 times, shows the boy with a can of dirt and a shovel pounding dirt into the holes.
“You’re gonna be something too, you’re a hard worker,” one man calls out in the video.
“I didn’t want people messing up their cars like my mom did,” Monte Scott said, according to WZZM.
“If somebody were to drive down the street and hit a pothole, and then would have to pay like $600-700 to get their car fixed, they would be mad,” he said.
Trinell Scott, Monte’s mother, said the boy never asked permission, he just got the job done.
“I was at work, and I got a text message from my niece, and she’d seen the video on Facebook,” she said.
“He just took it upon himself,” she said. “That’s just the type of kid he is. When he sees there’s a problem or a need, and he thinks he can fix it, he’ll try to fix it.”
The boy said he filled in 15 potholes and planned to finish the street and “keep helping the community out.”
Muskegon Heights Mayor Kimberley Sims lamented that “the problem is so bad that he feels he has to do that” while praising the boy’s initiative.
“I commend the young man’s efforts. He’s 12, he should be getting ready for school the next day, or playing video games,” she said, according to the Detroit Free Press.
Sims also added that potholes, common in the spring, are a symptom of a larger problem.
“(O)ur overall funding system is broke,” she said, adding that because Muskegon Heights is an economically struggling place, “the tax base isn’t there that would be in most communities.”
However, the city did come around to fill in the potholes on the rest of the street, WWTV reported.
On Friday, Monte Scott will meet Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who has been talking with state and local officials about legislation to fund the infrastructure needs of Michigan’s communities.
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