Finance Committee - 03/04/2020 Page 8
Alderman Klee
Just one more question? One of the other things when | did contact our Public Works and Ms. Byers was able
to give me what the score is of that street and so on.
Mayor Donchess
Which street are we talking about?
Alderman Kelly
Bell Street.
Mayor Donchess
Bell Street.
Alderman Klee
Yeah all of the other ones around it have been done. | am not pushing for Bell to be done but one of the things
that came up in our conversation is that sometimes if a street seems particular bad it doesn’t necessarily
bubble up to the top because it is better to take care of one that’s got less. Can you just kind of talk to that a
little bit?
Mr. Hudson
Yes absolutely, you are right. So we have roads that, there’s different categories of damage that may have
occurred over the life, so when a road is still in fairly good shape, it is best to come and do and mill and overlay
so that you repair just the surface layer; reseal the surface and you can preserve that road so that it lasts
longer. Once roads deteriorate to a certain point then you have to do more invasive, more complete repair
basically. We do a lot of reclaiming, we grind the road up, and then repave the full thickness. So that’s much
more costly. So to be cost-effective this program does a mix of those things; we don’t want to leave all our
very deteriorated roads to late. We want to take care of some of those too. But we are doing a mix, we are
doing a mix of the preservation and the reclaim. So yeah you may have a street that’s, you know, you say,
“Hey this street over here looks better than this one”. But there is a reason we are trying to save the better one
from falling into a worse category which would be much more costly in the long run for the City to bring back up
to par.
Alderman Klee
Thank you very much, | appreciate your answers.
Mayor Donchess
The point being that if you do a middle street it's much less expensive. If you just do just the worst streets then
you never get to the middle streets and they all have to be reclaimed and the whole thing costs more money.
Mr. Hudson
Exactly.
