Here’s How Durham Does Pavement Preservation
BY Sandy Lender
City of Durham DPW assistant director offers real-world examples of implementing a maintenance program on a shoestring budget for improved 76.5 PCI.
Tasha Johnson is the assistant director, engineering division in public work in the City of Durham. During the National Pavement Expo (NPE) 2024 in Tampa, she shared the public works department has implemented the use of the pavement condition index (PCI) rating system and an outside consultant to help her department select when and how to maintain the streets for which they are responsible, despite underfunding from the city council. Her presentation includes advice for communicating with residents and council members.
Johnson commiserated with the audience on a phenomenon contractors and agencies alike must deal with when it comes to pavement management systems (PMS): the public.
“There are 10 universities within 30 miles of the City of Durham,” Johnson said. “Everybody’s got strong opinions about what we do. And they probably know how to do it better because they’re an engineer, or they’re married to an engineer, or they work with an engineering firm.”
She shared how a citizen questioning a PMS decision is an opportunity. “They come from somewhere in the city that did it a different way so why don’t we [do it that way],” she shared. “We have lots of those conversations and we welcome them.”
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The City of Durham DPW manages an area with “a wide range of household incomes; a lot of haves and have-nots that we work through,” Johnson shared. That disparity takes on high importance because neighbors know what the DPW has historically done to improve community streets.
“When you go into a neighborhood with a different treatment type, everybody knows what surface mix is.” The residents accustomed to overlay paving the DPW has always done are aware that it’s going to make their road look good.
“And then I come to a lower-income neighborhood with some pavement preservation,” Johnson said. “They think they’re getting an inferior product.”
Of course, pavement preservation treatments are not an inferior product to an overlay. DPW now follows the adage of using the right treatment on the right pavement at the right time, but Johnson shared that her team had to learn how to have that conversation with residents.
“Our economy has transitioned from tobacco farming and marketing to more research and tech startups,” Johnson said. “Everybody has a strong opinion, and everyone wants to make sure that someone else is not getting something that they’re not getting.”
Treatments
“The residents have consistently ranked the condition of the city streets as an area of high concern for the 12 years I’ve been with the city,” Johnson said. Although the residents consider the roads a priority, the city council hasn’t been forthcoming with adequate funding .
“PCI is how we rate our streets,” Johnson said. “We do it every three or four years.”
To stretch dollars further to work on as many streets as possible, DPW strategized its preservation treatments, and in doing so, brought its system up to a healthier PCI. “Our overall PCI score went from whatever it was to like a 77, 76.5 in 2013.”
Once they achieved this score, funding became scarcer—in 2013, DPW requested $6 million of the city council to maintain the system. “They gave us no money. We scrambled together some residual funds from contingency when we closed out the bond projects and rolled that into a little piecemeal of a pavement program.”
Another year, they requested $6 million again and received three-quarters of $1 million. Something had to give. That something started with Broad Street.
“We paved Broad Street in 2015, but there was a trail project that was coming up [alongside it]. They wanted to restripe Broad Street to put in some bike lanes and they forgot to tell us that until after they’d gone out there and inspected the road.”
That missed opportunity gave DPW an idea. They went to Broad Street in 2016 and piloted a microsurfacing treatment to not only familiarize the staff with it, but to also familiarize the residents with it and see if anyone “noticed.”
Residents noticed. They asked a lot of questions and started calling the city council to complain that, “The street was just paved last year. What are you doing?”
Johnson explained that they shared with residents and the council what they were doing and asked everyone to be patient for the results. “We were hoping that the consultant’s words were true and that it would cure nicely and that in a few years nobody would be able to tell the difference…It turned out that our consultant was right and a couple of years later, I went out to try to find the joint between the surface mix and the microsurfacing and it had blended in so well that I couldn’t identify it.”
Another problem that lingered into 2016 had to be resolved with an inadequate bond amount of about $200,000 from 2008.
“Coming out of the great recession in 2008, 2009 we had a lot of developers that ran away and left infrastructure…The streets were failing, and they were missing the final surface. The utilities were sticking up, potholes were forming, curbing was getting jacked up out of the line and we were going to have to charge the residents to fix it, because this wasn’t a ‘city-maintain’ system yet. We don’t accept streets in Durham until they are completed to specific criteria. And this was not completed in any way that we were going to accept. So, this was on the residents to fix. And residents were not happy.”
To buy the residents some time and stave off further damage, DPW proposed microsurfacing. “There were other areas of the subdivision—phase one or two—that had already been accepted by the city. They were starting to deteriorate as well. So, we micro’ed the whole subdivision to bring it all up to a similar condition throughout and to reduce mobilization costs in the future.”
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Microsurfacing throughout the subdivision also gave the residents time to “cool down a little bit” about the situation they were in.
“It took a lot of talking with them, on the ground,” Johnson said. Her team explained to the residents the difference between microsurfacing and paving and what to expect. And her team reassured them about costs and responsibilities.
“It ended up being a good conversation.”
Microsurfacing is only one of the successful treatment methods DPW has implemented. Johnson also spoke of cape seals—which the department places like a chip seal. That treatment ended up being dusty and problematic for residents, so communication, again, took center stage.
“There were no houses along Woodcroft Parkway, but there were thousands of houses in little subdivisions off Woodcroft that backed up to it in some areas. We put message boards out. We put door hangers in the mailbox areas…We told them what we’re going to be doing because we knew it’s going to be a little dusty and they were going to be mad.”
The department has since added social media blasts and other efforts like a one-page frequently asked questions document via its new communications department. What they’ve accomplished is noteworthy.
They’ve gone to a roadway that’s in reasonable condition, performed a treatment before the neighbors think they should do it, and gotten everyone’s blessing in the end. They’ve done it because they can communicate to the residents and city council the wisdom behind performing the right treatment to the right pavement at the right time.
“We went out to Woodcroft Parkway and we did some preservation treatments on it about two years earlier than it needed to be paved,” Johnson said. “We did a treatment now that cost half of what it would cost you to pave in two or three years, and then we used those savings on another road.
“Now, instead of paving Woodcroft Parkway, I can do a treatment on Woodcroft and stabilize it for several years and use some more money and go pave another road that I wouldn’t be able to touch, period, because you’re underfunding me. It turned out to be a good thing in the end, but there was a lot of complaining and a lot of questions.”
The contractor that has won the bid to perform the maintenance work for the City of Durham for several years now is Slurry Pavers Inc., Richmond, Virginia.
“They are willing to go the extra mile in terms of engaging with our residents,” Johnson said, having multiple meetings virtually and in-person. “Slurry has set up a website that they update almost daily that shows which neighborhood they are going to be working in. So, when people ask questions, we can send them there.”
Internal, External Success
Having a successful maintenance and preservation program truly involves educating and communicating internally and with the public. Johnson shared that once the department stepped away from only using surface mix to repave everything, they implemented the PCI rating system and involved a consultant to assist in selecting the right treatments going forward.
“Then we needed some cross-departmental organization and we had to coordinate with Transportation because they might want to change up the striping on the road. And we had to coordinate with solid waste to make sure we were not tearing up a road when they were getting started with their collecting in that neighborhood for the week. We had to coordinate with general services, school buses and all that other stuff; DOT as well, because the roads did intersect in some areas.
“We had to educate our residents. We had to engage them first. And then we had to educate them about what we were doing. We had to reassure them that the product we were putting down was not inferior.
“But we also had to educate them on the fact that we’re doing treatments now. And we’re doing them differently so we can get to more areas of the city than before. We had some roads that hadn’t been paved for 30 plus years. So, your option is you can have this microsurfacing now…or you can wait and hope that maybe sometime in the next 10 to 20 years we’ll come out and pave.”
In the end, the City of Durham has a DPW that works hand in hand with its consultant, contractor and residents.
“We do multiple applications of pavement preservation over the life cycle of a road. Our desire is to keep it at a very high level for a longer period of time and to use that to get around to more roads in the city and bring those up over time. We need about $20 million to make that happen. We currently get about 15; before that, we got 10. So, the only reason our network is not completely falling apart in the last five to 10 years is because of pavement preservation.”