Kasold crumbling

Fixing pitted road will cost $2.5 million

Kasold Drive is falling apart.

The roadway between 15th Street and Clinton Parkway is so prone to potholes that sometimes the street seems to disappear into a pile of rubble.

“A couple of months ago after a big rain, it essentially turned into a gravel road for about 25 yards or so,” said Nick Gardner, who works at Cycle Works, 2121 Kasold. “They’re real quick about fixing it up … but I think it’s hard to keep up with that road out there.”

City officials agree. A big rain, they say, can nearly shut down Kasold Drive because potholes open so quickly. In early March, they say, a woman had to have her car towed to a garage after she drove into a pothole and couldn’t get out.

“She got a couple of flat tires,” said Tom Orzulak, the city’s street division manager. “There were several people that got flat tires that afternoon. The holes were really bad. It rained all day and there was nothing we could do.”

The road’s condition is so bad that the Lawrence City Commission this week gave the go-ahead to design a replacement for the 33-year-old road — even though the estimated $2.5 million price tag will be tough to handle during lean budget times at City Hall.

“At some point, maintenance is not cost-effective,” City Engineer Terese Gorman said, “and you have to rebuild.”

The section of Kasold Drive was built in 1971 and carried 18,655 vehicles a day during 2001, officials say. But the road doesn’t include subsurface drainage — and water has been eating away for years at the street’s underside.

Traffic along Kasold Drive between Clinton Parkway and 15th Street eventually may have a smoother ride. The 33-year-old road, which is prone to severe potholes, is in line for a .5 million makeover.

“There’s underground water up there — believe it or not, it’s at the top of the hill,” Orzulak said, referring to an area near Tam O’Shanter Drive. “That has deteriorated the base of the road so bad you can’t do anything with it anymore.”

The result, according to a city memo: “major potholes, rutting, raveling, and joint failure.”

In other words, you don’t want to drive there.

“It’s not real easy on your car’s suspension, that’s for sure,” Gardner said. “You’ve just got to go real slow and watch where you’re driving, just try to avoid the big ones.

“Some of them take up almost the whole lane. A lot of them fill up with water, so it’s hard to know how deep those things are.”

Orzulak said city crews spent too much time on Kasold repair projects. He said it was the worst section of road in town; Gorman agreed it was the worst major roadway in Lawrence.

“There hasn’t been a year in the last five we haven’t spent at least three weeks of crew time working on that street,” Orzulak said.

So officials hope rebuilding the road — this time with a drainage system — will reduce maintenance time and costs. Construction could begin in 2005 and take one or two years, depending on how authorities want to spread the budget pain.

Gardner is hopeful.

“If they can do something about that road, they should,” he said. “It’s definitely one of the worst in town.”