City, contractor prepare to repave residential roads
Kent residents may want to add five or 10 minutes to their travel time for the next few weeks as road repairs begin on 15 roads in local residential neighborhoods Thursday.
“Be patient, leave five or 10 minutes earlier, so they are not rushed in getting to wherever they want to go because there will be some delays,” said Jim Bowling, Kent superintendent of engineering.
*Locations are approximate
The project involves repaving five residential roads and repairing 10 others. Bowling said the division uses factors, such as a pavement condition index, to determine what roads to repair.
“It’s basically like a rating from 0 to 100 rating the quality of the pavement,” he said. “Every other year we have an outside firm come in and get the PCI rankings for all the streets in the city by block.”
The engineering division also uses road classification and the amount of traffic in its decision, Bowling said.
Map provided by Jim Bowling, Kent superintendent of engineering
“We also need to take into consideration that some streets say like Fairchild Avenue. Fairchild Avenue has over 10,000 cars a day compared to some residential streets that may be in worse condition but they only have 200 cars a day,” he said. “So that those with higher traffic counts will affect more of the general public and therefore we’ll want to get to those streets before they get — we won’t let them get in as bad a condition as some of the streets that have less traffic on them.”
Availability of outside funding also affects which streets will be done. Bowling said if a road is a federally classified road, the city can receive federal funds to repave it.
The city uses a mix of city, state and federal funding to pay for projects like these. Bowling said this project costs $780,000, which includes the contractors’ labor and material costs.
Potential contractors submit bids that include the costs of materials and labor and Kent Engineering Division chooses the contractor, which Kent City Council needs to approve, based on past experience and lowest bid, Bowling said.
The city contracted Delta Asphalt Company, Inc., a Tallmadge repaving company that has done roadwork before in Kent, to do the repaving and repairs.
Ted Fortseras, senior project manager at Delta Asphalt, said the weather will determine when the repairs will all be done.
“I don’t want to open up everything, have ground surfaces everywhere and then all of the sudden this weather comes,” he said. “Because even though the ground surface still has plenty of asphalt underneath it, it’s still compromised because now it’s just rough and the cars run over it.”
The company will tentatively begin grinding, or remove 2.5 inches of existing asphalt with a milling machine, Beryl Drive and Morris Road on Thursday, Fortseras said.
Map provided by Jim Bowling, Kent superintendent of engineering
“After we’re done with the milling, we’re going to clean up the surface so that we can see what we got,” he said.
A city representative will then come and mark areas on the street that need work. Then the company will do repairs on the subgrade and add a leveling course of asphalt, a geotextile fabric and a surface course.
The work on Beryl Drive and Morris Road, the two bigger projects, will take one to two weeks, Fortseras said. After work on those roads are complete, the company will possibly start work on repaving the three other streets and then repairing the remaining 10.
Fortseras said the crews will temporary close roads during the paving but might keep it open during other parts of the process.
“For the safety of travel and all workers, we ask that you maintain safe speeds through the workzones that will be properly signed,” he said. “Proper signage will be in place and flaggers in place if necessary.”