LARNED — A rural town street department’s work is never done, and some days it seems like a losing battle. In answer to a city council request for long-term street infrastructure maintenance plan, longtime Larned Street Department Superintendent Allen Taylor offered a five-year plan of regular maintenance, with a list of needs and an appeal to do what his department does best. It was presented at the city council’s regular monthly meeting this past Monday.

Larned, with its 3,700 residents, has about 130 lane miles of street in the community. That includes a combination of asphalt, brick, sand and concrete flatwork that, like most rural Kansas towns, is aging with each passing year. The majority is in 75 lane miles (59%) of asphalt, that was first laid down in the 1960s and early ‘70s. Secondmost is brick, which was predominately laid down in the 1930s-50s, at 39 lane miles for 30%, and sand/gravel, at nine lane miles for 7%. The rest is in concrete, at five miles for 4%.

As with most street maintenance, asphalt was at one time the most cost-effective, Taylor noted. However, it is also the most in need of constant attention.

“It’s the biggest percentage of surface we have,” Taylor said. “It’s also the biggest money bleed.”

Taylor explained that the average lifespan of an asphalt street is 20 years. As most of the city’s asphalt was first laid down 50 years ago, “those streets are suffering from age quite a bit,” he said.

The lion’s share of the street department’s budget, which is the second-largest in the city’s general fund ($624,000 or 21.6%), is spent in street sealing of the asphalt. The estimated 2023 budget plans to add another $60,000.

 A normal five-year plan for street sealing would be roughly 25 blocks per year that the department could handle along with its other duties of utility cuts, curb and gutter repairs, snow removal, stormwater maintenance and special projects. In recent years, however, there have been complications, Taylor said.

He explained that the sealing process is a top-down fix but the problems mostly occur underneath.

“What you get over the years is a build-up that adds more problems,” he said. “In a lot of places, there is 2-3 inches where we’ve sealed and sealed to the point where we’ve got a pothole on the manhole. The edges are decaying and breaking off.

“We’ve got 54 years on the newest asphalt we’ve got now. We’ve never milled anything or laid anything, it’s just a seal coat over the old stuff. That’s really not going to solve the problem,” he said. “It doesn’t fix the holes. 

“A lot of the asphalt after so many years is getting washboarded.”

A more recent problem is increased costs for the oil and sand required for the seal.

Working with Pawnee County, Taylor’s department was able to seal a 7,000-yard portion of Morris Street on the west edge of town. Taylor explained that the oil cost from the county to do the job at the end of September was $1.62 per square yard. “Fifteen days later we were finished with that stretch and the actual cost on that was just minimal patch at $5.90 a square yard,” he said. “Sealing sand went from $6.05 to $9.30 in 15 days. Patching asphalt that was at $75 a yard by the end of the 15 days the market price went to $105.”

One solution

Taylor said that some of the asphalt problems could be solved by milling the streets to 1-1/2 inch on the edge with a 1-inch overlay. A 10-block section of the worst streets and 10 blocks of the better ones was doable, he said. It could be accomplished by equipment rental or outsourcing the labor by contract.

However, the better answer is what the department has been best at all along, he said.

The durable answer

This year, the street department completed a two-phase CCLIP project on Northeast Trail Street that involved excavating and laying down about an eight-block run of concrete flatwork. The two projects totalling about $480,000 were accomplished weeks ahead of their scheduled project time, under budget by about $75,000 and with concrete and steel reinforcement materials left over.

Taylor noted that Trail Street, which continues U.S. 56 in south Larned, is one of the community’s most-traveled streets. “The last traffic cam we had on it was two years ago,” he said. “It wasn’t at harvest time and we counted 1,438 vehicles in 24 hours. I think now that number is closer to 2,000,” he said.

While concrete is more expensive to lay down originally, the benefit is in its durability, Taylor said.

“Concrete is about five times more durable than asphalt,” he said. Taylor pointed to flatwork projects completed in 2000 at Schnack Park around the swimming pool and south of the Pawnee County Co-op elevator as examples. “In 22 years, we haven’t had to spend a dollar in maintenance on those two projects,” he said. 

“Over the long term, our best bet is to take the worst of our asphalt streets and do what we do best in putting them in concrete,” Taylor said.

Immediate concerns

Taylor’s plan for the 2023 cycle targets several areas of high priority. They include:

• 10th Street from Park to Johnson with complete intersection at 10th and Johnson, replace with concrete.

• Eighth Street from Carroll Ave. to Corse Ave., edge mill and overlay or concrete replacement

• Eighth St. railroad crossings at Park and Fry Streets, asphalt to concrete

• Eleventh St. and Carroll to Morris, edge mill overlay

• First St. to State St. curb and gutter replacement and patch

• 17th St. to State St. overlay

“These are locations of projects listed by priority at this time,” Taylor noted. “The cost of materials and budget requirements after Jan. 1 will determine how far we can go from there.”