Road work headaches here to stay

After Kasold project is finished, a decade worth of repairs remain

Consider it practice, Lawrence drivers.

As construction crews rebuild portions of Kasold Drive, you’re stopping and going, honking and waving – or at least we’ll call that waving – as you attempt to navigate the one-lane bottleneck that used to be one of the city’s main north-south thoroughfares.

Get used to it because once the city gets done with this $5.4 million rebuilding of seven blocks of Kasold Drive, there are plenty of others just like it that they can tackle. Maybe you have heard of them: Wakarusa Drive, Bob Billings Parkway, 19th Street and several other streets that are among the busiest in the city.

“We have a lot of work to do, and I can’t emphasize enough that it is going to take a while,” said Chuck Soules, the city’s director of public works. “It won’t happen overnight.”

In fact, Soules said, it could take a decade for the city to get to all the major road projects that likely will need to be tackled. That assessment is based on a report completed earlier this year that showed about 30 percent of the city’s roughly 720 lane miles of city streets have deteriorated to the point that simple maintenance alone is not enough to keep them in satisfactory condition.

Motorists have started to notice.

Traffic travels in the northbound lane of Kasold Drive just south of Bob Billings Parkway during rush hour. The repair and repaving of this busy street is one of the city's most expensive road projects.

“I think it is fair to say that there is a certain level of frustration with it all,” said Ron Perry, a 12-year resident of Lawrence. “We have to understand that if we’re going to be a city, we have to do things like maintenance on a regular basis. That is the only way it works.”

A baseless problem

What residents really notice is that on some streets, roads repaved one year will be filled with potholes the next. What’s up with that?

Soules insists the problems are not the result of shoddy work. Instead, Soules said the problem goes much deeper.

Literally.

In fact, it goes all the way down below the surface of the road to what engineers call the road’s base. The problem with most Lawrence streets is that they have an untreated base. That means that the dirt used to support the asphalt or concrete surface has had no additives – anything from gravel to fly ash – to help ward off water.

The result is that the Kansas clay frequently shrinks and expands with moisture, putting stress on the road. That causes cracks to develop, allowing water to seep through the pavement and cause further deterioration.

Then, before you know it, you’re driving down a city street, look away to tune the radio and are jolted back into reality by your right front tire entering Lake Michigan.

Soules hears about that. And he doesn’t have any good answer, other than to tell people he’ll send a crew out to patch the pothole. Crews do that regularly, but most times the potholes re-emerge because a simple asphalt patch does nothing to fix the underlying problem of the street’s base. Only an expensive rebuilding, such as the one happening on Kasold Drive, can fix those problems.

If Chuck Soules could rub a magic lamp, one of his three wishes might very well be that all Lawrence roads have treated bases. But they don’t. Only a few roads that also double as state highways, such as Sixth Street, Iowa Street and 23rd Street, have treated bases.

“Basically, all of the streets in the city, except for the highways and a few other state-funded projects, do not have any base treatment,” Soules said.

Bad projections

George Williams knows that fact well. Williams was the city’s public works director for nearly four decades. He’s an icon in the state’s public works industry. The top public works award in the state is named for him, and so is a new West Lawrence street. He was once named among the top 10 public works directors in the country.

But know what? Williams now wishes that he would have built a lot of the city’s streets differently.

“I would agree with Chuck completely that we don’t have the base treatment we should have, especially on some of the arterial and collector streets,” Williams said.

The reason those streets don’t have a treated base is not because of shoddy work by contractors, but because the city didn’t design the roads with the bases.

Williams said there was no simple reason why designs were done that way. But part of it, he said, is that that designers may have been trying to be too precise. In other words, they didn’t want to underdesign a road, but they also didn’t want to overdesign it either.

“Sometimes we may have tried to be too sophisticated in some of the things we did,” Williams said. “Sometimes we paid too much attention to the strictly technical part of it, and maybe didn’t use enough common sense.”

For example, Williams said, engineers would not just try to project how much total traffic would be on a new road, but also try to project how much heavy truck traffic would be on a road. In a lot of cases, Williams said, it appears the amount of heavy truck traffic was underestimated.

“With all the home building that is going on, there’s a lot of heavy truck traffic all over town,” Williams said. “And it is difficult to tell a concrete truck that it can’t go down this residential street when his delivery is at the end of the street.”

Today, all new streets being built in the city have a treated sub-base, regardless of whether they’re expected to have heavy truck traffic. Soules made that change to the city’s standards about four years ago.

“It was one of the first changes I made,” said Soules, who was hired in 2002, after serving as the public works director for Emporia.

Aggressive maintenance

But disappointed drivers shouldn’t do all their finger-wagging at this treated-base issue. In Overland Park, many roads there were built without treated bases as well. But that city is not facing many major rebuilding projects.

“I don’t think we have any four-lane thoroughfares that we are going to have to tear out anytime in the near future,” said Doug Brown, the director of Overland Park’s Public Works Department.

Many of Overland Park’s major thoroughfares are 30 to 35 years old. That’s about the same age as Kasold Drive and is older than Wakarusa Drive – which Soules said has portions that will need to be rebuilt, though a timeline hasn’t yet been set.

Brown said streets in Overland Park are expected to last 50 years before they need to be rebuilt, though they are repaved every six to seven years. Overland Park gets that type of longevity from their streets, though many of them don’t have treated bases. Overland Park adopted a treated-base standard only about 10 years ago.

The key, Brown said, has been an aggressive maintenance program. Overland Park during the past 23 years has had a pavement management program that ranks and scores the condition of every piece of pavement in the city. Lawrence started a similar program just this year.

Overland Park also has had a formal crack-sealing program – a critical strategy for keeping water from seeping into road bases – for 10 years. Lawrence began an aggressive crack-sealing program about two years ago.

But Brown said the biggest factor has been that city council members in his community have consistently given him the money to fund an aggressive street maintenance program. During the past 10 years, Overland Park – which has about 1,700 lane miles of road – has seen its street maintenance budget grow from about $3 million to about $9 million.

That hasn’t always been the case in Lawrence. The current group of city commissioners did add about $1 million to the city’s street maintenance budget for 2006. But the commission just previous to the current one – which included all the current commissioners except Mayor Mike Amyx – agreed during the 2004 budget process to reduce the street maintenance budget by about $200,000, largely in response to a decrease in state funding that put the city budget under strain.

“There is no doubt that we as a community have not put enough money into our infrastructure,” said City Commissioner Sue Hack, who has been on the commission for five years. “I think where we are at now is that we’re all realizing that we haven’t done an adequate job, and I’m willing to take my 20 percent of the blame for that over the last five years.”

City commissioners have directed staff members to come up with ways to add more dollars to the city’s street maintenance budget, but they haven’t committed to raising taxes.

Instead, interim City Manager David Corliss is working on a report detailing different ways that streets could be funded, which could include impact fees. But Corliss said the city in all likelihood will need to find new money or increase property taxes.

“Our mill levy went down by about a mill and a half for 2006,” Corliss said. “We haven’t cut any programs, and we’re trying to add programs, so we will have to look at our priorities.”

Whether the city was ignoring its infrastructure any more than a typical city does, though, is an open question. It seems clear that it hasn’t done nearly as much as cities like Overland Park, but a check with other area cities found practices similar to Lawrence’s.

Topeka, for example, began putting treated bases in only two years ago, and many of its major streets are in need of replacement when they reach the 30-year range, said Dave Bevens, a spokesman for the Topeka Public Works Department.

Williams said he knows it has been tough for public works directors everywhere to get the appropriate levels of maintenance money from governments. He said part of that is because to do street maintenance correctly, it has to be done before the potholes and other things that drivers notice start to appear.

“I think sometimes commissioners figure the roads don’t look like they need money so let’s leave it for another year,” Williams said. “But sometimes that extra year or two causes problems.”

In Lawrence’s case, Williams said, it has been several years.

“I do think we have a pretty big chore ahead of us,” Williams said.