Council to consider 8-year pavement plan

Volkert Engineering presented a pavement management plan to the Homewood City Council in a March 7 work session. The plan is an attempt to balance the need to fix bad roads in the city with maintaining the good roads before they become bad, too.

“It’s easy to see a road that anybody can tell needs work, but you need somebody who can go out and do analysis of all your roads,” Mayor Scott McBrayer said.

Kirk Mills and two other Volkert representatives presented their overall eight-year plan, which was created after assessing pavement throughout the city and Homewood’s budget for paving projects. The plan includes a variety of solutions, from repaving to crack seals and seal coats, to improve and preserve roads depending on their condition.

Mills said Volkert has prioritized the city roads based on current condition, daily traffic and any planned ALDOT or utility projects that would disrupt the road. It seems counterintuitive at first, but Mills said that preserving high-traffic roads already in good condition should be the first priority, since it is about six times cheaper to preserve a good road than to repair it once it is damaged.

“Our simple recommendation would be to preserve the priority roads in the plan,” Mills said.

Volkert came up with a $4 million plan that, over eight years, would keep Homewood’s current pavement condition rating of 76 out of 100. The plan, Mills said, includes about 60 percent good road preservation and 40 percent repairs to high-complaint roads each year.

“I think it’s important that this pavement management plan obviously address repairs but also address preventative [measures],” McBrayer said.

Some roads mentioned as first priority include College Avenue, State Farm Parkway and roads near the city schools. Valley Avenue has one of the worst ratings in the city but is already slated for an ALDOT improvement project, which McBrayer said will be let for bids in July and begin construction in August or September.

Based on Volkert’s study, the $4 million plan would fix about 10 miles of road in the city, with most money being spent in Wards 1 and 2 and the least being spent in Ward 3.

If the city wants to improve its score over eight years, Volkert has more comprehensive pavement plan options up to $20 million. They also provided each council member and the mayor with a booklet outlining elements of the plan and the full listing or city roads by priority.

“The $4 million is, in our opinion, a minimum that we recommend,” Mills said.

The council is taking time to study the pavement management plan and will decide at a future work session how they want to proceed. There is about $200,000 left in the 2015-2016 fiscal year budget for pavement projects, and the incorporation of this plan will factor into upcoming budget discussions in the summer and fall.

A potential new ordinance concerning the quality of road patches after utility work will also factor into the pavement plan. The council is looking at Birmingham and Mountain Brook’s decisions about patching to improve their own, as utility patches have caused problems on roads recently.

McBrayer has supported this pavement management plan because of the difficulty of anticipating road needs without experts. He said that spending money to protect good roads in the beginning will make the city’s dollars go a lot further, though it’s too early to say how much the council will ultimately decide to spend on the project.

“I think it’s exciting for us, really, and it looks like there’s a lot of different options in repairing roadways,” McBrayer said. “We just need to fund it.”