When Mayor Doug Diny campaigned for the office of mayor, he made a promise that he would fix the city’s roads. He had a large poster board graphic highlighting the poor conditions of some of Wausau’s roads. It sat in his living room when I interviewed him for a story about the race.
Now that Diny has been in office for more than two years, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to crunch some numbers to see if roads had significantly improved under his leadership, testing whether the campaign promise actually came true.
The nice thing is that we don’t have to rely on vibes here, on looking at a road and saying “well, gee, that doesn’t look so good.” Road crews use a rating system called PASER, which grades pavement from 1 to 10 based on its visible condition. Higher is better.
The not-so-great thing: the reports are compiled every two years, and most of the data is historic.
So we gathered the 2023 and 2025 reports from Wisconsin’s local-road database, WISLR, which contains road information local governments report to the state. Unfortunately, the data from 2023 mostly comes from 2021 and some from 2022, and the 2025 report mostly contains data from 2024. None of it is from 2025.
So that means the data available wouldn’t really reflect much of Diny’s time in office, and therefore wouldn’t say much about whether he had a positive impact on the roads.
But that doesn’t mean we didn’t gather some very interesting data about the condition of Wausau’s roads, and whether they’re getting better or worse.
The picture is mixed. In our analysis of paved city roads in those files, the average rating slipped slightly, from 5.88 to 5.84. Miles rated 2 — near the bottom of the scale — increased from roughly 6.5 to 11.3. But the total rated 3 or lower stayed almost flat, at about 39 miles.
And when we contacted Public Works Director Eric Lindman, his information, which came from GIS maps and not the spreadsheets sent to the state, painted a different picture. That further complicates the picture.
Funny enough, the road my driveway is on came out worst in our ranking. Lead service line work has since torn up the already banged-up road even more, though these older ratings wouldn’t necessarily capture that.
But first, here are the ten worst roads by PASER rating among streets with at least half a mile of rated pavement in our analysis.
So which streets came out worst? Below: the ten-street ranking, what Diny and Lindman say about the city’s approach, and why the city’s figures don’t match our analysis of the state records.