STARKVILLE — How can Starkville save money on road maintenance?
The plan is simple — maintain good roads while they’re good, not after they deteriorate.
“That’s how you get ahead,” City Engineer Cody Burnett told The Dispatch Friday. “It’s not waiting until you fail.”
Burnett, along with Dan Cordell of Southaven-based Civil-Link, presented results of a Civil-Link study on the city’s roads to the Starkville Board of Aldermen at its Friday work session. The study, approved in October, gathered data on all the city’s roads by taking pictures and videos and calculating variables such as road age, condition and traffic volume.
It also assigned a 1 to 10 rating for each 50-foot segment of road. A score of 1 noted the need for total repair, while a 10 described a road in brand-new condition.
Starkville’s average was 5.5, Cordell said.
He compared maintaining roads to maintaining a house. He said painting walls and simple upkeep is far preferable to rebuilding walls and repairing roofs.
The prior approach, Burnett explained, was to build a road and leave it alone until it needed a major repair, such as a new overlay of asphalt.
Asphalt is quick and convenient, but also expensive, and over the last several years, the city has seen its road maintenance costs tick up.
“That’s really concerning to us, because that means even in years where we’re spending millions and millions of dollars, we’re still incrementally getting behind in our maintenance program,” he said.
“You’re wanting to get the roads out of the loss category and prevent other roads from getting into that category, because that’s where you lose money,” Cordell said.
Civil-Link’s approach, Cordell said, is for the city to repair all roads with structural problems while also keeping good roads in good condition with maintenance-style repair.
He said about 33% of the city’s roads need structural repair while 66% need to be maintained.
According to Civil-Link’s estimates, the city needs to budget about $3.4 million a year over the next 10 years to bring all of its roads up to a “maintenance” level. Over that time, Cordell said, the city would see more savings.
The city spent $4.1 million on road overlays in 2023, $700,000 more than what it would spend annually under Civil-Link’s suggestion.
“I think long term, you would not only see a huge economic benefit, but I think you would see the roadway network slowly get better too,” Burnett said.
He said the city is not abandoning doing new overlays with asphalt.
“If a road needs to be overlayed, we’ll overlay it,” he said.
Instead, new methods such as microsurfacing will be used. He described microsurfacing as a thinner kind of asphalt that is used on newer roads without much wear-and-tear.
He said the next step is for contractors on various projects to bid on upcoming projects. From there, city engineers will use Civil-Link software to compile a list of priority road repairs that will be brought before the board for approval and begin repairs using the new system this summer.
Kevin Edwards is news editor and reports on Starkville and Oktibbeha County government.
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