Crumbling streets need more money to fix them

2013 Middletown road work

Source: City of Middletown

This is the first of a two-part series looking at the condition of many of the city’s streets and the aging water, sewer and combined sewer system.

HAMILTON

2012 Concrete Repair and Resurfacing: (April 1, 2013, to Aug. 1, 2013)

COST: $2.25 million

GRANT: $994,000

CITY’S SHARE: $ 1,256,000

Cleveland Avenue between Haldimand Avenue and Sanders Drive

Symmes Road between Gilmore Road and Enterprise Drive

North B Street between 200 feet south of Black Street to Gordon Avenue

South Front Street between Knightsbridge Drive and Pershing Avenue

Grant Circle

North C Street between Main Street and Park Avenue

North Third Street between Dayton Street and Hensel Place

Elvin Avenue between Park Avenue and North D Street

Neal Boulevard between Fair Avenue and Greenwood Avenue

2013 Concrete Repair and Resurfacing (Sept. 1, 2013, to June 1, 2014)

COST: $2.4 million

GRANT: $1,150,000

CITY’S SHARE: $ 1,250,000

Amberly Drive between South D Street and South Washington Boulevard

Hyde Park Drive between South Washington and Millville Avenue

Richwood Drive between Columbia Road and Carriage Hill Lane

Livingston Drive between Taft Place and Ellsworth Court

Taft Place between Brookwood Avenue and the west end of Taft Place

Woodbury Court (entire)

Alton Court (entire)

Buckeye Street betwen North 7th Street and N. 10th Street

Benninghofen Avenue between St. Clair Avenue and Clinton Avenue

Symmes Road between Gilmore Road and Enterprise Drive

Neal Boulevard between Fair Avenue and Greenwood Avenue

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

East High Street Gateway (Oct. 1, 2013, to Oct. 1, 2014)

COST: $ 8,500,000 (entirely city’s share)

Source: City of Hamilton

Give Middletown and Hamilton a blank check to fix all the streets in need of repair, and they would write it out for more than $300 million, collectively.

Mother Nature and the recession have taken their toll on the aging asphalt in Butler County’s two largest cities. Dwindling budgets have delayed or limited street repairs for years, allowing city crews to only patch the pothole-peppered pavement in parts of Middletown and Hamilton.

The end result: Scores of disgruntled, complaining motorists who’ve had to shell out hundreds of dollars to replace and realign their vehicle tires.

“It seems like they fill one pothole and another forms right behind it,” said Jordan Craycraft, who lives at the corner of Dickens Avenue and Baker Court in Middletown.

Craycraft said he hasn’t experienced any damage to his car, but every time he drives over a series of potholes, he clenches up.

“It rattles me in my car,” he said.

It would take between $10 million and $13 million a year (not including interest) for the next 15 to 20 years to bring all of Middletown’s roads up to standard. In Hamilton, the city would need to spend between $5 million and $7 million a year over the same time frame to repair or repave all of its crumbling streets, according to a 2009 assessment, the most recent available.

Middletown and Hamilton are not the only communities struggling to maintain their roads. The American Society of Civil Engineers has given a D+ to America’s infrastructure, which encompasses 16 categories, including roads and water and sewer systems. Every four years the industry agency issues a report card that evaluates conditions and investment needs for major sectors of infrastructure.

Middletown has roughly 262 center line miles of roadway, and about a third is considered poor or worse. Hamilton has 254 center line miles of roadway and half are rated poor as of the most recent estimate.

Center line miles represent the total length of a given road from its starting point to its end point. The number and size of the lanes on that road are ignored when calculating its center line mileage.

Middletown had increased its income tax by 0.5 percent in the late 1960s for capital improvement projects, which would include maintaining and repairing the city’s roads. However, that changed in the mid-1980s when voters permitted the city to not earmark that money for capital improvement work.

“We’ve been underfunding streets for almost 30 years,” said Preston Combs, Middletown interim Public Works and Utilities director.

Most of the low-volume local streets are in need of some type of repair, Combs said. The city had asked voters in the mid-2000s to approve a tax levy to help pay for the streets, but the campaign that would have generated around $3 million just to bring the roads up to a fair standard failed.

“I would classify them as varied,” said Middletown Mayor Larry Mulligan about the overall condition of the city’s streets. “There are some that we’re able to do some recent maintenance on, and there are some that are scheduled for some improvement. But there are many that are in need of repair.”

Compared to other cities, the mayor said “they’re average.”

“I don’t think we’re better off, but I don’t know if we’re any worse off,” said Mulligan. “I was here on a street in Cincinnati and I was shocked at how bad it was. I know we have folks who have high expectations for the conditions of the roads, and we do what we can to try to keep those up, but money is very tight.”

Roads remain a priority for the city, Mulligan said, but with so much of the city’s $29.7 million general fund budget tied to fire and police – a collective $20 million a year – there’s not a whole lot the city can do short of putting a levy on the ballot.

“It’s going to require some sort of funding,” he said.

Of the 262 center line miles in the city, it could take between $28.5 million to $57 million just to repave the roads. But Assistant City Engineer Scott Tadych said with a significant portion of city roads in need of reconstruction, that price tag is likely to jump to about $140 million – not including the cost for curbs, gutters and sidewalks, and interest since it could take 15 years, maybe more, to improve all roads.

Councilman Josh Laubach has been one of the more vocal local elected officials in Middletown about roads.

“The challenge is, we aren’t budgeting to bring them up to standards,” Laubach said.

The city has spent an average of $1.77 million on street improvements and paving the past two years. But just to keep the standards, it would take upwards of $10 million a year.

And with a cash-strapped budget, the city needs to reallocate money into improving the city’s infrastructure.

“You have to reduce cost in other areas,” Laubach said. “I think all costs are on the table, personnel costs being the highest. That takes up the greatest portion of the general fund. You can’t solve that without looking at that area.”

The root of Hamilton’s road-related problems stretches back to before 2008, according to Richard Engle, the city’s director of public works/city engineer.

“There was a period of time where I believe they did not put any funding toward street improvements. I think that hastened the decline that we’re experiencing now,” said Engle, who started at his position in 2008.

Prior to 2008 and 2009, the programs weren’t as disciplined as they are today, Engle said. Now, the city focuses all of its Ohio Public Works Commission funds on the resurfacing program and looking for new revenues, such as a kilowatt hour tax dedicated toward resurfacing.

“There’s much more interest and focus (now) on the street improvements by both the city administration and City Council,” he said.

Lack of funding is the biggest obstacle to keep roads maintained, Engle said.

“If I could push $10 million a year towards a resurfacing program, we could make a huge improvement citywide,” he said. “If you look at how ODOT does their system, they try to resurface every 10 to 12 years. By just doing the math, we would have to put out a program that was (in the range of) $10 to 15 million per year” in order to maintain all roads.

The city’s worst roads aren’t always the ones being addressed first, Engle said. That’s because the city will push off repairing or resurfacing a road if a utility project is scheduled to occur there within a year or two, he said.

An updated inspection of all city streets is scheduled for this June and could result in a higher number of streets officially in need of repair, Engle said.

However, the city’s street department has conducted resurfacing programs over the past couple of years and purchased a paving machine to do patch paving.

“Not just pothole patching but actually grinding and paving sections of streets that are in really poor condition,” he said. “We’ve done a little bit more maintenance than we’ve done in the past.”

“That will be an interesting evaluation to see what impact our work has had on the rating that we’re going to have redone.”

Hamilton Mayor Pat Moeller said the city administration and city officials always strive to be responsive to those who call about road repairs, whether it related to potholes, severe cracking and other wear and tear.

“If we can’t actually do the paving based upon our budget and our scheduling, we will try to improve the situation any which way that we can,” Moeller said.

Having $100 million on hand to take care of all the city’s roads in the course of a 2-year-span would be the most optimal situation, Moeller said. However, the harsh reality of the state and federal economies makes it a constant challenge to obtain grant money.

“We have too few dollars to do all the paving jobs that we want to do,” Moeller said.

One of the projects Hamilton has scheduled for its 2013 concrete repair and resurfacing is Livingston Drive. The street, which got its start more than three decades ago, is a cobweb of cracked pavement between Taft Place and Ellsworth Court, the area that will be addressed between late 2013 and early 2014.

Learning on Friday that his block would soon be repaired, Dave Ippolito pumped his fist in the air and shouted, “Yay!”

“That’s wonderful,” he said. “I thought it was going to be five to six years” before the road was repaired.

Ippolito said he realizes a majority of the damage is “the normal wear and tear on pavement” that has come as a result of plow damage and frost heave, when the water gets into the pavement, freezing up and cracking it.

“It’s not a huge issue, but for me, it’s a little overdue,” he said.

Middletown residents have a strong opinion about the poor condition of the city’s roads, and Combs doesn’t see how the city cannot agree. But residents have said “no” on multiple occasions about giving any additional money to the city to fix the roads.

“We have made several presentations to council, it’s gone to the voters several times. They do not approve the money to take care of the streets we know the way they should be taken care of,” Combs said. “We can only do the amount of streets with the amount of money we have. Period.”

“They’re continuing to get slowly but surely worse. More streets are falling into the fair, poor, very poor condition every year because we’re spending a lot less per year then we need to just to keep in the existing condition,” he said

Keith, a Middletown resident who did not want his last name printed because he has “been fighting with the city” over road conditions, said his street has “potholes galore.”

The well-manicured lawns and maintained homes along Dover Avenue don’t match the patched and potholed roads that run through the Ayershire subdivision. But the worst of the streets in Keith’s neighborhood are Vancouver Avenue and Dickens Street. He said the roads carry a lot of traffic because they are the only ways in and out of the subdivision.

The poor roads have “cost me repairs on tires and alignments,” he said. “We have standing water that does not drain off the street, and in the summertime weeds that grow up in the cracks.”

The roads give a bad impression to the city’s residents as well as its visitors, Keith said.

“And it is not only the streets, it is the crumbling curbs, sidewalks, and driveways,” he said.

Combs knows “they’re terrible.”

“We don’t disagree at all. They are the worst condition,” he said. “But without sufficient funds you can only do so much. We don’t do the worst first. We’ve got to take care of the ones that carry 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 vehicles.”

“And the worst streets often need more than to be paved, said Tadych. You can’t just do a mill and fill (a basic repaving) and an overlay. You’re almost rebuilding.”

A basic repaving could cost about $50,000 to $100,000 per lane mile. A reclamation project, which is rebuilding a road, that could cost upwards of $500,000 a lane mile.

“To fully rebuild a street, you’re going to have to go down to dirt and start over,” Tadych said.

“For next year’s list (of street repaving), we need to get in there and do three or four of these streets,” Combs said.

“But if you don’t keep up, some of the roads that were rated good (five or six years ago) are going to slide down the scale. This scale just keeps sliding the wrong way. If you wanted to keep up, you’ll have everything at least in fair condition.”

“It seems like there are a lot of potholes in every area of Middletown,” said Harold Jarman.

They just filled a pothole in front of his cul-de-sac street on Baker Court, but it took two to three years for the city to get to it, he said. Jarman said it seems like they are always trying to fill in potholes, but “it seems like they miss half of them.”

Hamilton spent about $4.4 million on concrete repair and resurfacing for 2010 and $2.7 million in 2011. Eaton Avenue reconstruction in 2010 cost $782,635 and a resurfacing and maintenance program in 2011 cost nearly $2.5 million.

The 2012 concrete repair and resurfacing program, which is scheduled to start April 1 and end in August, is estimated at $2.25 million. The 2013 program, scheduled to start this September and end next June, is estimated at $2.4 million.

Hamilton factors in utility projects, citizen complaints, funding eligibility, economic impact, available funding and existing condition of the street, among other factors, when deciding which roads get repaired.

The city always submits grants for Ohio Public Works Commission funding and tries to direct a fair amount of community development block grant money toward streets in areas of town where its eligible to use such funding, Moeller said.

“I think our public works department does a good job in trying to put the puzzle together of matching sources of money with parts of town that need it,” he said.

Middletown has about $600,000 to $700,000 it receives from property taxes that’s earmarked as general capital improvement funds, but projects are supplemented with federal, state and other funds. Over the past two years, an average of $1.77 million had been spent on road improvements and paving. This year, roughly $4.4 million is budgeted to make road repairs, and almost half of that is dedicated to just street paving.