City Needs to Find Funding Sources For Road Maintenance To Avoid This Problem in the Future
A press release late last week announced that the City of Davis and International Surfacing Systems (ISS) have reached an agreement to address problems with double chip seal installed on several local streets last fall. The double chip seal was originally intended to prevent intrusion of water into the asphalt on the roads and to extend the life of the driving surface.
Through a collaborative effort, the City and ISS have recently come to an agreement for ISS to remedy the problem areas. City staff will continue to observe all of the streets that received the original double chip seal and will address additional problems as/if further remediation is required.
ISS will be notifying the affected residents as soon as possible. They hoped to start work by Tuesday, November 1, 2011.
During budget talks, the city became aware that the product they were using, hopefully as an inexpensive way to reduce the costs of repaving streets, was actually causing a whole host of its own problems.
As the city put it in a press release, “Chip seals such as this are used in place of asphalt overlays because it is a relatively inexpensive way to extend the life of a street needing remediation. The process seals the street to minimize intrusion of water into the surface and can extend the useful life of a street for up to ten years.”
Or so they believed. The problem is that sometimes when you cut corners trying to save money, you end up spending more money in the long run because you are using an inferior product.
As many residents complained, the chip seal was a bit spongy, especially as the weather heated up, and this caused all sorts of inconsistencies and problems in the road surface. Six or seven people in the same neighborhood came forward that night at the city council meeting with complaints about chip seal.
After much complaining, the city finally admitted what apparently many people knew eight months ago, that this experiment has been an abysmal failure. But they worked with the company toward a solution.
Or so they thought.
Councilmember Sue Greenwald, one of the first to speak out against the approach the first time around, indicated that she was not happy with the solution.
“I would like to look into a better treatment than the chip seal,” she told the council.
City Manager Steve Pinkerton reminded council that on the 29th of November they would be having a more thorough discussion of their capital needs when it comes to roads.
“That might be the best time for talking about how much we’re going to be dedicating toward capital infrastructure in the future,” he said.
“Except there’s a problem with this,” Councilmember Greenwald pointed out, “which is that I don’t want us to go ahead and agree to something if we don’t want to do it.”
This is something that has been worked out, that many were not agreeable to.
As Mayor Joe Krovoza pointed, “The sentiment has been expressed, no more chip seal period, so I’m a little nervous that we chip seal on top of bad chip seal, we continue to compound the issue a bit.”
City Attorney Harriet Steiner, “The way the staff went forward was to get the contractor to do what the city had contracted with the contractor to do, which was an appropriate chip seal project.”
She continued that this was to fix the existing problems.
“That is what he has now agreed to do and what they are planning to move forward with. If council really doesn’t want that to happen and wants to stop that right now he has no obligation to give the city’s money back. He has an obligation to correct the work that has done to our satisfaction.”
The council then learned that they were scheduled to start repairs on Thursday.
Sue Greenwald argued that this should have gone to council as a closed session item to discuss the approach that they would take to the negotiations.
City Attorney Harriet Steiner suggested that they could add this to an existing special meeting on Monday.
Neighborhood resident Kurt Austin is concerned about the state of their neighborhood with the new construction.
“Now what we have in our neighborhood is a freshly coated street filled with embedded leaves and twigs in the street, along with gouge marks where either the contractor tore up the fresh material or they allowed others to drive in and tear it up,” he told council during public comment.
“All of us are getting very frustrated,” he said, “we lived all summer with a soft gooey smelly mess that has tracked into our homes.”
He said that the next round looks better but is actually rougher in many ways. He recommends the council to come to his street to see what we are paying for.
All of his neighbors would have “preferred to have kept our old cracked street as opposed to what we have now.”
“It’s still a problem,” he said, noting that he rushed down to council rather than staying at home to eat with his family. “I quite honestly would be willing to pay more in assessment dollars to have a real street than have this stuff. It’s crap, quite honestly.”
We thought that would be it until Monday, however, Harriet Steiner informed the council that the company was balking at the work haltage due to increased costs.
The council then, by a 4/5th vote requirement, put the item on for closed session after the meeting.
The Mayor was not happy at the city’s announcement that they had this agreement after the council in July asked that there be no more chip seal without notice to council.
While the proceedings of the closed session will never be known to the public, apparently that discussion, which ended just after midnight, culminated with the council agreeing to tell staff to allow the contractor to proceed fixing chip seal at no cost on identified streets to see if it improves the condition.
This is precisely why the city needs to have the funding and resources to undergo street maintenance without attempting cheap solutions like chip seal. In the end, it is a pain to the residents and more hassle than it is worth to both city staff and council.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
The company needs to fix what they did. A very poor product. Loose gravel, pooling water, a sticky, smelly mess that tracked everywhere. Difficult for bikes to ride on and forget kids playing in the street. I hope they don’t just pile on another layer of this horrible stuff. I would prefer that we truly re-pave the streets.
On our street, the smell was just awful, especially on hot days. And the DWR garbage trucks would create divots in the stuff just turning in the cul-de-sac. When a huge moving van turned around at the end, it created such huge. deep divots that we called city staff out. They had city maintenance throw some asphalt into the divots. Sheesh! This paving company should have its contractor’s license pulled.
Took a walk in S Davis late this afternoon and it looked like they were working in Willowbank.
[quote]As the city put it in a press release, “Chip seals such as this are used in place of asphalt overlays because it is a relatively inexpensive way to extend the life of a street needing remediation. The process seals the street to minimize intrusion of water into the surface and can extend the useful life of a street for up to ten years.”
Or so they believed. The problem is that sometimes when you cut corners trying to save money, you end up spending more money in the long run because you are using an inferior product.
[/quote]
What is not clear is whether chip seal is just a poor substitute for re-asphalting, or if the type of chip seal used/chip seal installation was just inferior. Since the company in question that provided the chip seal and installed it have agreed to “fix” the problems, it sounds as if it was either a defective product or a defective installation. I am not a construction engineer and know nothing about this process, but I know chip sealing is used just about everywhere, and I have not heard of such difficulties before. The bottom line is the company has to be given the opportunity to cure the defects in either the product/installation. However, moving forward, it sounds as if this product and/or company should not be used again by the city. But that does not necessarily mean chip sealing as a method of road maintenance is a bad way to go…
EM. “However, moving forward, it sounds as if this product and/or company should not be used again by the city. “
But Elaine I believe they were put working today in SDavis.
[quote]But Elaine I believe they were put working today in SDavis.[/quote]
That is bc either the contract for work was already signed; or bc they were correcting defective work already done. So what I am saying is that going forward, ANY NEW CONTRACTS should not be with the company/product…
Chip seal is used for rural roads or in areas with rain or snow to provide skid resistance. My husband’s first comment when they did our street was that it looked like the country roads from his childhood in the Central Valley. This is not appropriate for neighborhoods where people use the streets to play basketball, rollerblade, skateboard, teach their kids to ride bikes, have block parties, etc. If we only drove cars on our street, chip seal would probably have gone unnoticed. But we’re a little nuts here in Davis and like to hang outside with our kids and neighbors.
The streets they are re-doing now are not all of the streets that received the initial bad chip seal job. We (chip seal victims) are still trying to determine what will happen to the other streets. None of us want a “good” chip seal job, but the City is in a bit of a pickle here between residents and the contractor. The trouble with doing remediation in November is that we won’t know how it will stand up to the heat until next summer. In 90 degree weather, we could stand a stick straight up in the gooey pavement!
Has anyone discussed the dust issue? The issue of ground-up, fine dust is becoming a problem. I’m sure this system has it’s merits on main roads with high speed, high volume traffic that clears this from the road in short order, but cul-de-sacs are an another issue. I have noticed a great deal of black dust coating cars and inside the house no doubt caused by heavy garbage trucks and turing traffic that slowing grinds this coating into a fine powder. Some small northern CA towns had problems with this in the past when it was discovered that the rock quarries providing the rock were unaware of the very high content of asbestos in the product. I not saying this is the case here, but do we know what’s in this powder on our streets? The process just seems to have so many flaws for low volume neighborhood streets, especially cul-de-sacs.