City Engineer Cody Burnett likens maintaining roads to taking care of the vehicles we drive on them.
“You don’t buy a car and drive it until it explodes because you never change the oil,” he said during a board of aldermen work session Friday at City Hall. “You make the initial investment, you change the oil, you rotate the tires and those minor improvements extend the life of your vehicle.”
Unfortunately, Burnett said, Starkville is among the vast majority of cities that don’t operate their road programs that way, something he’s hoping to change.
“What most communities do is you overlay a street, and you pray you don’t have to touch it again for 20 years, or until the complaints are so bad that you have to,” he said. “… We will always overlay streets. … But it’s one of the most expensive treatment options that there is. So if that’s the only tool that you have and you treat every street with the same tool, it’s hard to ever catch up financially.”
In Fiscal Year 2023, Burnett said, the city spent about $4.1 million on road overlays. But based on today’s prices for paving material, it would take between $5 million and $6 million each year in overlays just “to stay caught up.”
On the other hand, the city could begin strategically applying less expensive maintenance treatments to roads every five to seven years – seals and thinner overlays based on the road’s age and condition – that would extend the life of one full overlay to as much as 40 years.
“(Then) you’re not just saving money, you’re also bringing up the quality of all your streets together,” Burnett said. “… It’s not an inferior product. It’s just maintaining your roads.”
The first step in the process is gathering data for all the city’s roads.
Aldermen on Tuesday plan to approve a $54,500 agreement with Southaven-based Civil-Link for those services. It will be included on the consent agenda, which means the item can pass without further discussion.
Burnett said Civil-Link personnel would ride and video all city roads, assigning a rating every 50 feet. Those ratings would be based on the road’s age, condition, traffic volume, etc.
The company will provide its assessments and recommendations along with software the engineering department can use for up to three years. After that, Burnett said the city can renew its access to the software for $2,000 per year.
The GIS deliverable system can be integrated into the interactive map on the city’s website, Burnett said, meaning citizens could see a road’s rating, when it was last overlaid and treatments it had received since that overlay.
For the city, the software can take the annual road maintenance budget and spit out a “best bang for your buck” plan, Burnett said.
With the assessment information and recommendations as a starting point, Burnett said the engineering department can ultimately develop and maintain a stronger road plan in-house.
Mayor Lynn Spruill said Pontotoc, Hattiesburg and Rankin County are among users of Civil-Link’s system.
“We can make those decisions based on actual data, and I think this is just an extraordinary way for us to do that,” she said.
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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