STARKVILLE – When City Engineer Cody Burnett’s office took over the road program nearly three years ago, he and his team found themselves at a crossroads.
After receiving an evaluation from South Haven-based Civil Link, which provided a rough outline of roads in need of repairs, Burnett said he knew he had to find a way to extend the lives of city streets without exclusively doing asphalt repaving.
“So that kind of led us on this journey of pavement preservation, and the thought behind it is, you are overlaying streets, but you’re also keeping your good roads (from) becoming bad roads,” Burnett told The Dispatch.
Over the last three years, Burnett and his office have been incrementally repaving and preserving roads in the city based on a 10-year road plan developed from the Civil Link assessment, which has saved the city millions in annual road maintenance.
Burnett said if the city had exclusively stuck to asphalt repaving, it would have cost about $4.5 to $5 million per year on average, exceeding the city’s annual $3.3 million currently budgeted for road repairs.
A mile of asphalt repavement would cost the city about $150,000, but with other approaches focused on road preservation, that cost is cut from one-half to one-third of the cost by resealing, Burnett said.
Rather than repaving roads with a layer of asphalt, the preservation process for better roads involves using a variety of seals to preserve the top layer of asphalt and to fill any cracks that may have formed, Burnett said. There are a variety of methods for repairing a road depending on the condition and for roads in need of less repair, a sealant has proved to be much more cost effective, he said.
Starkville manages about 315 lane miles of roads within the city limits. So far through this updated method, Burnett said his office extended the life of about 100 of those lane miles.
The roads program attempts to address the roads that are in good enough condition to preserve while also complying with the city’s policy to maintain the roads with the most traffic, Burnett said.
“We pick streets based on their (average daily traffic),” Burnett said. “Now that doesn’t mean that neighborhood streets don’t get done occasionally, and one day, we’ll be doing a bunch of neighborhood streets. But right now, the city still has quite a bit of higher traffic streets we have to address first, and so that really guides the decision making process.”
Going forward, Burnett is aiming to improve cataloguing roads by keeping a digital log of improvements done each year and by assessing roads more regularly, he said.
“It’s very, very similar to vehicle maintenance,” Burnett said. “If you buy an $80,000 truck you don’t drive it until the engine explodes, and (then) buy another truck. You change the oil and rotate the tires. (That’s) pennies on the dollar compared to the cost of the truck, but it makes the truck last a long time in the same way that we treat our roads.”
Repaving in Columbus
Kevin Stafford, city engineer for Columbus, said he will present a pavement plan to council members next year based on data collected by Golden Triangle Planning and Development District for Lowndes County in August.
The data was intended for cataloging addresses within the county, but scans conducted by GTPDD will also grade the condition of roads. The condition assessments will be used to develop a comprehensive road pavement plan, he said.
“Our next discussion will be similar to what Starkville has been doing,” Stafford said. “Which is looking at, ‘OK, now that we have a basis of money (and) we have a new assessment of all of our streets, how do y’all want to go about tackling and catching up on your street conditions?’”
Stafford said the city hasn’t had a comprehensive road assessment conducted in 25 years. The new assessment will give the city council a chance to implement regularly scheduled preservation processes and a consistent repaving plan on approximately 600 lane miles of roads in the city.
In a similar way to Starkville, Stafford said the approach could focus on resealing a lot of neighborhood roads to improve their life spans while focusing most of the larger repaving to roads that see a lot of daily traffic like those in downtown.
“I’ll probably have some (conversations) with the city officials in an open work session to kind of see what their willingness for allocating money towards paving is, and what kind of sequence of phasing they want to go through,” Stafford said. “… (That) will help set the budget, and then the question is, ‘All right, well, what is our goal?’”
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You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 42 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
