It’s the Potholes, Man!

The race for Amarillo mayor is getting a little spicier, which is about time.

A random, unsolicited, and bizarre text message popped up on my phone yesterday, screaming some lunacy about Jason Herrick’s political commercial, a pothole, and an “Adult Video Gallery parking lot.” Hmm. Salacious stuff and emblematic of the high quality political discourse we’ve all become so accustomed to in 2025.

The gist of the message is Herrick, who is running for mayor, shot a commercial about the insidious and perpetual Amarillo pothole problem. The text message claimed one of the potholes in the commercial was from a private parking lot that belongs to some porn place.

First, I have to say, the commercial is straight up hilarious. Jason Herrick is driving while talking about political things when you hear this tiny voice say, “pothole” and then there’s a bit of pothole overacting while the truck shakes and clunks. This happens again and again. It’s funny stuff, regardless of the many questions around like: “Who’s warning about the upcoming pothole? A guy in the truck with him? But isn’t that guy running the camera? If he is, how does he see the pothole? Why are you shooting a video with your candidate driving anyway? In Amarillo, that’s taking your life in your hands. Why does Jason say, “We just have to find a way to bring in manufacturing jobs” instead of saying, “Here’s my plan”?

But answering those questions would make a crummy TV spot, and I’m just being stupidly picky. The commercial is funny and makes its point directly. It’s good political marketing.

The text message I received is trying to raise a stink about this one issue: did the commercial falsely represent a private pothole as a public one? It’s pothole gate!

And . . . whatever.

This is as if we’ve never seen a politician exaggerate to make a point. It’s similar to calling Mayor Cole Stanley a clown. Of course this is an exaggeration. We all know he couldn’t possible get into clown college much less graduate from one.

Yes, potholes are a problem. They are ALWAYS a problem. Anyone running for a local municipal office can easily say, “I’m running to fix our streets.” A challenger always has the pothole strategy to stand on. Or, in the case of the massive and unrelenting pothole on Olsen, stand in.

I was curious, however, about this odd text message that came with no signature or responsible party behind it. The message says, click this link to learn more.

The link itself is from a link shortening service, and of course the braintrust behind this text campaign doesn’t quite know how these things work. So I’ll tell you.

The link uses a service called Rebrandly. If you use them, you can see how many people click your link. It’s basically an “analytics” service that tracks you.

It looks like these anonymous texters who sent out this message are using Rebrandly’s free service, and that means all of us can see the results. So if you’re curious, all you have to do is pop the link from the message into your browser and add a “+” to the end of it. Ta da! You too can see everything.

It’s very similar to how the Amarillo City Council operates right now. They’ll show us a little meeting, but once we add a “+” to it we get to see the whole thing. And the whole thing is oftentimes ugly.

And the potholes? Well, they belong to the current mayor, just like they’ll belong to the next mayor as well.

So raise a glass to Mayor Cole Stanley, Prince of Porn Potholes.