Special Board of Aldermen 10-14-2021 Page 2
ingredients — tar, or sand, or other things like that can really make a big difference. So at least in my observation that
initial inspection at the production plant has meant that the quality of asphalt we see on the city streets has been
consistently better and that means much more longevity and money much better spent. So with all of that, I'd like to
thank all of our staff for everything that they've done over these five years and have made, you know, this significant
progress. They have to work with utilities and it's far more complicated than it seems to pave this many miles of streets
in a few years. So I'd like to thank Director Fauteux and everybody else who's been working on this for helping us really
advance and improve Nashua’s infrastructure. So with that, | will give you Lisa who probably will turn it over to Dan or
someone else.
Lisa Fauteux, Director of Public Works
Great. Thank you for that introduction, Mayor. Good evening. | will turn it over to Dan Hudson and Mark Saunders
who will be presenting this evening.
Dan Hudson, City Engineer
Thank you Director Fauteux. I'm hoping that the presentation can be shown on the screen here. Let me know if | need
to do anything.
Alderman Klee
Do we need to switch it over? | think you have to give them administrative rights or something to screen share.
President Wilshire
| apologize for all the technical difficulties. I'm not sure why we keep having these issues.
Dan Hudson, City Engineer
Thanks for everyone's patience. Again, my name is Dan Hudson, City Engineer. Tonight what we'd like to do is make a
presentation here and highlight the first five years of the paving program, explain the strategy used to determine the
health of the roadway network and overall pavement management philosophy. We'll touch upon different preservation
treatments, coordination efforts, and what it takes to pave a road. Finally, we'll share conclusions about current status of
the program.
Okay so just touching base on paving history so prior to 2017 as the mayor indicated, the city was typically paving
around 6 to 8 miles of roadway annually. At this rate, we were losing ground as evidenced by poor overall condition of
the paving network. So a 10-year plan was established. The first five years was approved and funded and over that first
five years, we've paved 113 miles, which is a good amount. We've also done crack sealing and other things.
The city currently maintains 311 miles of publicly accepted roadway. Thirty-three percent of that - about 100 miles - is re-
inspected annually. So we've broken the city into basically thirds and each year we go around and we inspect 1/3 of that
network so we can update the conditions. As the Mayor explained, the roads are scored. It's called the PCI “pavement
condition index”. It's a zero to 100 score similar to a grade and school. Zero is a totally impassable road and 100 is a
perfect road. So you want to be as close to 100 as you can get. So we assess the roads, analyze the conditions that
enables us to model deterioration so we can predict how things will perform over the years with different treatments and
such
We break the PCls into treatment bands. So given certain ranges, it can range from 100 would be do nothing because
again, a perfectly new road down to conditions closer to zero, and those would be a full base rehabilitation where you
actually have to grind up the whole road, or dig up the whole road, and replace it. Obviously, that's very expensive.
When the roads are in good shape, you want to maintain them. We're doing a lot of mill and overlay. That provides a
new surface of the roadway. But the goal here is to make roads good and then keep them good and that will provide
cost savings in the long term for the city.
So here is the work completed to date shown as blue highlight and green highlight on the map on the right. The green is
this year's program. The blue is previous years but in total that's the five years. Again 113 miles paved on 520 streets.
We've crack sealed 102 miles and that's on over 400 streets. The average PCI has increased 11 points. Here's a little
graph of that. It's been a steady increase since the 5 years of the 10 year program was funded and has been put into
place.
