Meeting transcript
2020-21 Andover Road Work Planning by Town Administrator July 2020 Meeting
July 6, 2020 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Hi, folks. My name is Eric Anderson. I'm the administrator for the town of Andover, and today I'm going to be speaking to you about all things, road and road network. Okay. First off, roads in Andover are the single most expensive asset that the town has. We have about 34 miles of paved roads, and it would cost us about $17,000,000 if we had to replace that road network and we also have about $15,000,000 worth of bridges and culverts in the town of Andover. One of the reasons I'm doing this presentation is I get a lot of residents expressing their frustration over the quality of the town roads. A typical conversation is hey how come I have potholes or uneven pavement or this or that on my road? And then the second question I get a lot is why did we fix you know a particular road when we didn't fix my road, my roads worse? So that's what I'm going to be talking to you about today is the road network. So first of all, here's the things I'm going to talk about today. I'm going to talk about annual maintenance, the public works crew, the concepts and pavement management, road conditions here in town, and how we evaluate the roads, and then what the plan is in Andover. So first of all the Public Works Department currently we have a three person crew although we're hoping to hire one fourth person this fall. We do have a little bit of money for a summer helper that does mowing. The crew also does all their own vehicle maintenance
and the road crew foreman who's one of the three people is also the tree warden, the burning official, and has to inspect all the new driveway aprons. As the town administrator, I function as the public works director. So the next thing is what do we have to do every year to our roads? There's a lot of annual maintenance that we need in the roads. First, we need to sweep the roads every year. We also need to scrape the sides of the road to get out that organic material that's built up and prevent the water from running off the roads properly. We need to mow the sides of the road ideally twice a year and we need to clean all the catch basins in the road. Those are those drainage structures with the grates in the road
and in the bottom of the catch basin, there's something called the sump and that is where all the leaves and sand and dirt and gravel accumulate and we have to clean that out every year or else it backs up in the sump and then gets caught in the pipes where it's much harder to deal with. We also need to clean out all the waterways. We typically spend some money every year repairing guardrails and we also deal with missing and replaced signs. For some reason people seem to feel the need to steal our signs from time to time. We also do road striping, tree trimming, and a bunch of other things as just routine annual maintenance. Next thing I want to talk about a little bit is the difference between preservation and rehabilitation on roadways. So preservation is maintaining the good roads. It's relatively inexpensive. The idea is to work on the road before it gets bad and generally keeps people happy. The second part is rehabilitation and that's what you do to fix the bad roads in the town.
It's fairly expensive. It takes a lot of time. And by the time you get to that point, there's lots of cracks and potholes. And generally by the time a road gets to the point where you're rehabilitating it, then people are unhappy. So preservation is just the job of keeping something in good condition. If you thought about it like your house, if instead of waiting for the siding on your house to completely rot away, if you had wood siding, if from time to time you scraped it and repainted it, in the long run it would be a lot cheaper than waiting till it needs to be replaced totally. And roads are the same thing. If you put money into them early, you can save yourself from putting a lot more money into them later. So Andover's roads, some of them are pretty bad. We're not alone. Connecticut's roads in general are some of the worst in the country and Andover's roads for rural roads are about as average with the rest of the state. Basically about 14 miles of our roadway are either poor or failing. So the question is why? There's three main reasons. One, we haven't been spending enough money.
Two, we haven't done enough planning and three, we haven't had enough personnel. So one of the things that's driving the cost of roadwork is the cost of liquid asphalt cement. As you can see from 1990 to now, so over about a thirty year period, the cost of liquid asphalt has gone up about five times. And that's the major cost or one of the major costs in asphalt. So paving has gotten a lot more expensive and we can't do the old days which was just pave 10% of the roads every year and, you know, and keep our roads in good condition that way. So Andover for a long time has used a what's called the worst first approach and basically we wait till the roads get really bad, and everybody's complaining and the board of selectmen you know get sick of listening to all the complaints and they tell the public works department to repave the road.
So that leads to high cost and it leads to poor road condition. In the past, the town of Andover has used crack sealing and then paving and reconstruction and then gone out and fixed potholes And that was the majority of what we've done for the last twelve to fifteen years. So now we're going to try to turn that on its head and switch to a preservation first strategy and that means we're going to be fog sealing, crack sealing, chip sealing, micro surfacing, cape sealing, and considering cold in place recycling. And we'll talk about all those things in a little bit. So this is an example that makes the case for pavement preservation. This is a road that's shared between two towns and it's divided down the center line. This whole road was completely redone at the same time, but the town that owned the road on the right side chose to do preservation
and the town on the left did not do anything and you know fifteen years difference, fifteen years later there's a huge difference in the quality of the road. So this picture is taken one year after the previous picture and you can see the town on the left has now filled in some of the pot holes, but the road is still really rough condition and the town on the right, they they six years after the road was paved, they crack sealed it and then microsurfaced it and then eight years after that they crack sealed it again. So half of this road is still in good shape, good to drive on and require minimum ongoing maintenance and half of this road needs to be ground up again and redone. So ultimately, the reason you do preservation is because in the long run, it saves you money and you get to drive on better roads. So when we talk about pavement and quality of pavement, we're talking about what's known as the pavement condition index. This is a rating from zero to a 100 and it's a weighted average of different types of defects in the pavement like cracks and potholes and rutting and what's called raveling. And raveling is when a pavement starts to get very rough because it's losing the fine aggregate that's in the pavement. So generally speaking when a road gets down to about 60 people are starting to complain that you know they don't like the road and that it needs to be to be something needs to be done there.
So this graph represents the deterioration curve of asphalt. In year zero, you've just repaved and you've made a beautiful new road that's in perfect condition. And then for about ten years, the road seems really nice and then very quickly over the next five years it goes from really nice to really bad. This is what happens if you don't do anything to the road. So pavement preservation is the idea that you're going to apply treatments to the road to shift the curve to the right so you can go longer before you have to, you know do what's called an overlay or add pavement to the road. So this also lists out the various different techniques and at what road quality or road PCI are they best applied. So this is another example of the case for preserving roads versus rehabilitating roads. The curve in blue is a strategy of preservation and you can see the overall quality of the road never gets down to the point where people are complaining about it because it only gets down to a PCI of about 60 and the green is what happens if you only pave. You basically wait fifteen years till the road is really bad and everybody's complaining, then you pave it, then you wait fifteen years, you know, and you keep cycling through that. So preservation is a lower cost and maintains a better overall road quality and leads to generally happier people. So what types of things are pavement preservation? In the upper left is an example of crack sealing. This is a crew using, something called PCRM, which is a compound specifically for filling cracks and roadways and keeping water from getting under the road and causing problems.
Then the next picture on the top is an example of a micro surfacing material being applied to the road and then on the bottom left is a fog seal being applied over a chip sealed road and then the one all the way to the bottom right shows a very thin overlay of asphalt being applied to a road. Okay so next I'd like to talk about how we think about roads aging. So the town of Andover has 34 miles of year miles of road and every year all those roads age and get one year older. So you can think of that as 34 mile years of aging of our road network per year and if we maintain roads and we add 34 mile years of maintenance to the road, our roads stay the same. If we do more, the roads get better. If we do less, the roads get worse. Each treatment or each maintenance thing that we do to the road, we think about the number of miles of treatment that we're doing times how much life it adds to the road and we get mile years restored
to the road, which is also called the added network service life. And again as long as we're adding more to the roads than the roads are aging, the overall road network is getting better. So we also look at something called the equivalent annual cost and basically what that is is the cost of a treatment times its effectiveness and on the left we list out all the different treatment alternatives that we do in town and then on the extreme right is the cost per square foot per year and you can see you get much more bang for your buck from crack sealing than you do reconstruction. In fact, if you let roads get all the way to the point where you need to reconstruct, that's about five times as expensive as if you surface treated them early in their life expectancy. So this is the same slide but in graphic terms, you can see that it's much more expensive to do crack sealing, fog sealing, chip sealing than it is to wait until you need to mill and fill or rehabilitate your paper. So what is a fog seal? A fog seal is a light application of an emulsion and an emulsion is basically just asphalt plus a rejuvenator plus a water all mixed up together into a fine milky looking substance and it gets applied to newer pavement as a protectant and it's applied in roads that look really good, don't have any cracks in them, that look like new pavement. That's the perfect time to be applying a fog seal.
So they protect the road against oxidation, they protect against moisture getting down into the road and they protect against raveling which is the fine material, the sand in a road from getting lost. They're low cost, highly effective, and they delay the need for more expensive repairs later. Basically what they do is they replace a series of compounds that are in the asphalt called maltines that get lost just from sunlight and weather in general. So the next thing we do is crack and crack seal is a modified asphalt that is put on the road very hot and then it cools and hardens but it stays flexible. So what its job is to seal the road and keep moisture from getting down into the road and damaging the road.
And the guy in the green shirt is putting a material over the top of it, applying it by hand that keeps you from, your tires from sticking to the crack seal if you drive over right after it's sealed. So crack seal is generally applied to roads starting about five years after the road is paved when the cracks first start to appear and you're going to apply that you know in the five to seven year range of a road. And what it does is it reduces potholes and sub base failures because it keeps water from getting down into there and causing freeze thaw damage in the winter. It also minimizes impact on traffic in the neighborhoods and it's again very cost effective. So the next thing we want to talk about is a chip seal, And so a chip seal can be used on pavement that's in fair to good condition that has moderate cracking. And if you have big irregularities in the road surface like big dips and stuff like that, you should do what's called shimming, which is putting a leveling course of asphalt over a portion of the road before you do it. And a chip seal can be combined with another technique called microsurfacing
for basically a double layer seal. So many of you are familiar with this, we have just done this on the number of roads in the town of Andover. So the next thing is microsurfacing, and microsurfacing is a single or double layer of material that's put down its asphalt emulsion, a very fine stone plus a mineral fiber and it's applied as a surface treatment on the road to bring back skid resistance and also smooth out the road. So it is typically applied to roads that are in about you know an 80 to 75 PCI condition and if it's used in conjunction with chip seal it can be used on roads that are worse than that. So you chip seal first and then micro seal over and that's commonly called a cape seal. So this is what it looks like when they're micro surfacing and micro surfacing is a way to prevent the pavement underneath from oxidation and moisture intrusion and it restores the good surface characteristics of the road but doesn't really raise it up so much that you have to adjust your catch basins
or worry about changes in the runoff you know into people's driveways and stuff like that. It also provides a beneficial increase in skid resistance. So a cape seal as we just talked about is a combination of the two things. It's first a chip seal that's applied and then the micro seal is applied or micro surfacing is applied on top of that. Okay. And again, a cape seal road, you know, the road has to be structurally in good shape, but the pavement can be, you know, quite a bit farther down the spectrum, and still be effective. So again cape seal first step chip seal, second step micro seal over the top of that. And we're going to try to use cape seals
whenever we're on a road that we know has really high pedestrian traffic such as the Lake District. So chip seal plus fog seal is the other alternative. Many of the roads like Juravadi or Wales Road, we have chip sealed and then we're planning on going over the top of the chip seal with another fog seal. And what that does is that fog seal kind of locks in the chips, provides good retention and it also smooths out the road. So you end up with a road that is a lot better, can take a lot more snowplow damage and is a little smoother than a straight chip seal road. So
now we're going to turn away from techniques and talk about how we determine what the condition of our roadwork is. When I first took over as the administrator, one of the things I did was I went around and I used a program that was freeware from the state of Maine that our town engineer had previously evaluated the roads and I repeated that so we had data from two years apart. But I also realized that we needed a better method and that just relying on me to evaluate the roads wasn't the best plan. So we looked at a number of different companies, engineering firms that provide that service and we settled on a company called StreetScan which does an automated roadway evaluation program. Basically they drive over the roads and they have a really efficient camera system that takes pictures of the road every 10 feet and then an automated program compares that with you know what the quality of the road is. And then they go back manually and they look at 10% of the segments to make sure that the computer did a good job of evaluating the quality of the road. So one of the advantages of that is it takes out the human element and it gives you a completely you know, biased look at your road network. So when you're done scanning the roads, you get something back, in a program called StreetLogic, which is a really interesting program to deal with And it gives you what the average quality of your road and then it gives you the PCI of each road segment that you have in the town. And it also tells you what your total backlog of maintenance and in our case, it tells us that we have about $4,800,000
of roadwork backlog to get our roads up to a perfect condition. So it's an online program, It's fully customizable and has a budget and repair evaluation modules built in. So it lets you do a lot of analysis of your roadwork and optimize how you're going to go about repairing. So the average PCI in Andover is 62 and for an ideal road network it would be 80 to 90 depending on how picky you are about your roads. Again, Andover is quite a bit behind in paving and pavement preservation funding. Our average road are about three quarters of the way through their useful lifespan. So think about it another way, in a perfect world, if your roads were halfway through their useful lifespan, that means you were putting in the correct amount of maintenance and about 42% of our roads are either poor, very poor, or failing. The other thing to keep in mind is when a road gets below a PCI of about 55, it deteriorates very fast. So the next question is what's our plan for dealing with it? First of all, we're assuming that we're going to get money from the DOT, what's called Town Aid Road, and that this budget season we're in now, we're going to be able to budget about $300,000
for roads and we're going to get about a $100,000 to spend from Town Aid Road and we'll spend the $75,000 from the nineteen-twenty budget this paving season also. So the plan is to use street scans planning tools and we're going to prioritize based on cost effectiveness, prioritize roads with more traffic, preservation over reconstruction, and long term improvements over, you know, short term improvements. So we're also going to try a bunch of new techniques and we're going to evaluate their performance to make sure they're doing what we think they're going to do and that they're cost effective here in the town of Andover. And we've shifted from spending most of our money on rehabilitation to now spending about half of our money on preservation and half of our money on rehabilitation. So first goal is to preserve the good to moderate roads and to prevent further deterioration simply because it's much more cost effective. Goal number two, make sure that what we're doing for roadwork presentation aligns with the drainage work we have to do in town cause it's not cost effective to go treat your road and then immediately turn around the next year and tear it up because you've got to change out a bunch of culverts and a bunch of drainage pipes.
So the plan. So we're going to use a series of different techniques. We're going to use crack seal and we're subbing that out to a company called Indus. We've had really good luck with them in the past and we're using a crop bid for that. We're going to use fog seals, two different types, actually three different types. We're going to use a rejuvenating fog seal. We're going to use a separate different one on our walking track, and then we're also going to use a straight non rejuvenating fog seal over our chip sealed roads. We're going to put leveling shims of pavement on some of our roads. We're going to chip seal. We're going to fog seal. We're going to micro seal over the chip seal. And we're also going to do some paving and we're going to spend some time doing pothole repair. So crack sealing, we're going to spend about $50,000
and we're prioritizing those roads that we're going to be chip sealing and surface treating in the next budget cycle. So fog seal, rejuvenating fog seal, we're going to do Windrush, E Street, Townsend and Sunset and then we're going to switch to a different compound for the walking track for two reasons. One, it's better for the grass and the second reason is that the more environmentally friendly one can be applied cold, which means we don't need a large truck so we'll do less damage to the field while we're doing it. And we're also going to leave Ryan Road which was paved at the same time as Townsend. We're not going to fog seal it and that way we can watch those roads for a couple years and see how effective the fog ceiling has been in you know slowing down deterioration. So shimming, So one of the things we're going to do is we're going to shim the roads prior to chip sealing. So we're going to shim as part of next year's paving or next year's chip sealing plan. We're also going to do the bridge on Merritt Valley Road.
We're going to shim the sides of the bridge and the reason is right now we didn't pave all the way to the sides of the bridge and water is going off the sides of the bridge going down into the stone foundation of the bridge and causing deterioration and we need to stop that so we don't, have to rebuild that bridge anytime soon. We're also planning on doing Shawty Mill Road after we finish the drainage work, which will be the next project up after we finish the transfer station and we're going to shim the transfer station where we've torn up the asphalt rebuilding the walls. And if we're done with that and we still have money, we have a bunch of other streets we'd like to shim. So chip seal. We're going to spend a fair amount of money chip sealing this year. We're doing Jurabadi, School, Lakeside, Riverside, Oak Farm, Stanley, Chesterbrook, and Wales. If we're lucky at the end of the paving season we'll be able to sneak in a chip seal repair of the transfer station also. So now we turn from, the preservation side to the reconstruction side. Shimmings also reconstruction but but it can be considered either. So we have about a $140,000
to repave and we're looking at a couple different options either mill and then pave or just pave and we're looking at Shawty Mill Road after we're done with the drainage work and also Long Hill Road from Route 6 to just past Bear Swamp. We know we need to repave over the bridge deck on Long Hill Road and we're also going to be tearing up some of the asphalt when we do the connectivity grant project. So afterward it would be good to just pave it and get that road done. So the last thing I wanted to talk about and one of the things people have the most issues with are potholes and pavement patching. So traditionally we do one of two things. We either cut out the bad section, we saw cut it out, remove the old asphalt, and then we hand fill it with hot asphalt from an asphalt plant and then use a vibrator and pack it down and that makes a good patch.
But the problem is it's very time consuming and we also waste a lot of material because we don't have any way to keep the pavement hot when we get it. So when we get the new asphalt from the plant, it comes really hot and the whole time it's being driven here and put in the ground, it's cooling off as we don't have any we don't have what's called a hot bath, a hot box which would keep it hot. So we lose a lot of material and it's a kind of inefficient process. We also use something called cold patch that can be done at any time of the year. It's a material that kind of chemically cures when you take it out of the bag and you basically put it in the hole and you pound it down with a hand tamper. The problem is it doesn't last very long and it's really expensive. The good part is you can do it when it's really cold so you can winter patch with that material. So what are we going to do differently this year? Last year we tried a technique called mastic sealing using Indus as a contractor and proven to be a durable and long lasting patch but it's really expensive. We just looked at the numbers and decided we you know we couldn't do enough of it to do us any good. So this year we're going to try a different piece of equipment,
something called the dura patcher and basically it has a big liquid, you know, liquid tank and then you also have stone on the truck and it can mix those two as you go and put that material into the patch. So this is what it looks like in action. There's our regular truck. This is the part we rent and, basically first you blow out the crack, then you spray in first the hot liquid which acts as kind of a tack coat so it binds to it, and then you spray in a mix of stone and hot asphalt which is basically what paving is anyway, and then you spray some loose stone on top. So the great thing about it is it's really fast and it seems to produce a long lasting patch which are the two things we need. So overall, here's what we're looking at spending. Crack sealing about $50,000
chip sealing about $200,000 and some of that will be the cost of the micro seal that goes over the top of the chip seal. We're also going to be spending about $75,000 or so shimming roads, about $140,000 on paving of roads, and about $20,000 on pothole repairs. And that's of course subject to money and the getting, you know, effective bids back from contractors. So that's it. And, if you have any questions, you can always email me my email is e anderson andoverct dot org and I thank you for taking the time to watch this and, that's it. Have a wonderful day.