Common Ground: Keeping up the roads in tough times
Did you ever wonder how the Department of Public Works in Waterford decides which town roads to repave in a particular year and why some roads are completely dug up and built from scratch while others seem to just get a quick new coat (crack seal)?
The town has a computer program that keeps track of every road in town, and “Pavement Distress” is determined by visual inspection and the score is logged in the program. Each road is assigned a Pavement Condition Index (PCI) Calculation on a 0 to 100 scale. The higher the PCI the better condition of the Road.
Roads scoring 93 to 100 need no maintenance, while those below a 39 on the scale need a complete rebuild, according to the PCI.
In spring 2015, the average PCI in Waterford was 70 and there were 119.6 miles of pavement backlog broken down as follows:
[naviga:ul]
[naviga:li]Do nothing, 22 miles[/naviga:li]
[naviga:li]Routine maintenance, 30.4 miles ($578,982)[/naviga:li]
[naviga:li]Preventive maintenance, 360 miles ($2,331,178)[/naviga:li]
[naviga:li]Structural improvement, 13.7 miles ($3,121,879)[/naviga:li]
[naviga:li]Restoration, 15.2 miles ($5,136,108)[/naviga:li]
[naviga:li]Reconstruction, 2.2 miles ($2,669,737).[/naviga:li]
[/naviga:ul]
The total cost of this repair was $13,837,886. It would cost more to reconstruct the 2.2 miles ($2,669,737) than to do preventive maintenance ($2,331,178) on 36 miles of road.
Due to the cost of rebuilding the schools, it was obvious that the Town of Waterford had let the condition of its roads deteriorate to an unacceptable level. To maintain the 70 PCI of 2015, then, the town would have to appropriate $1.16 million per year.
In FY2018 Waterford had appropriated or designated $383,638. There are grant requests submitted for an additional $2,171,000 that will most likely be approved.
Waterford needs to set a condition goal and then allocate sufficient budget to achieve that goal through a mixture of pavement preservation through preventive maintenance and the funding of major road repairs.
John W. “Bill” Sheehan is a former Democratic Town Committee chair in Waterford.
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