Scott Swanson
A serpentine pile of gravel down the center of 29th Avenue last week represented what could be a new approach to fixing streets in Sweet Home: chip sealing.
Thursday morning, Aug. 20, a street sweeper rolled slowly down 29th, sucking up the loose crushed rock after an application of layers of quarter- and eighth-inch gravel pressed into asphalt emulsion that had been spread on the street.
It’s the first complete resurfacing of a street in “a few” years in Sweet Home, city Public Works Operations Manager Dominic Valloni said.
Although the county and state frequently use chip sealing on roads, the city has never tried it, said Public Works Director Greg Springman.
In fact, it was a Linn County crew that did most of the work on 29th Avenue, Valloni said.
“Linn County is a great resource that we have,” said Lagea Mull, city public information officer. “Linn County is doing the work for a lower cost. They have the equipment.”
Springman noted that Marion County did road striping for Sweet Home earlier this year.
“Dominic works with them and it pretty much grew from there,” he said.
Valloni said the reason the city hasn’t used chip sealing in the past is because it’s difficult to use that process on streets with curbs and gutters, though the cost is lower than regular paving, which is what the city has done in the past to repair streets.
Springman said that because residential streets like 29th don’t have a lot of heavy truck traffic, chip seal may stand up well to normal traffic.
Chip sealing on routes used by trucks usually lasts three to five years, Valloni said.
“This isn’t a state highway or county road, so you don’t have heavy commercial loads, like logging,” Springman said. “Speed, how people turn through corners, would have an effect on how well it survives. We may get more years out of it. This is a good test for us.”
The city had 29th, as well as Juniper and other streets on its capital improvements list last year, for full “mill and overlay,” which would have required grinding a couple of inches off the top layer of the existing asphalt pavement with a large milling machine and replacing that layer with new asphalt.
The cost would have been more than $300,000, Springman said.
Chip sealing costs about half what a mill and overlay would.
“This is a different technology, but it’s more of a permanent non-fix,” he said.
Springman said the city gets state gas tax money but has no local funding mechanism for streets – “whether that’s a transportation tax or a gas tax for local use.” He said that the tourist traffic in Sweet Home makes him think that would be a logical solution for city street repair.
“We get tons of boaters who are coming here every year, but I don’t think we’re taking advantage of that, or the the Jamboree people. They’re using our roads. Other towns do that. That’s just one of the things I think would help us get back to the place with our roads, to help funding.
“The revenue source from the state, that limits us. There are things we can and can’t do.”
Valloni said the city has “many roads where we have maintenance issues” and that the 29th Avenue project will be “a good test” of whether chip seal may be a way to address those.
“Many neighborhoods use 29th to travel through,” he said.