By Ashley M. Casey
Staff Writer
The town of Lysander’s roadways are in pretty good shape, town engineer Al Yager said in his annual pavement maintenance presentation at the March 16 town board meeting.
Yager explained that the town uses the Cornell Asset Management Plan Road System (CAMP-RS) software and a visual assessment to determine the maintenance schedule for Lysander’s 96-plus miles of road.
According to the program, the town’s roads have a Pavement Condition Index number of 70. Yager said performing regular maintenance when roadways are in fair condition — a PCI value of about 60 — can prolong the life of the asphalt surface. For every $1 the town spends on preserving its roads, Yager explained, it saves $6 to $10 later on in road rehabilitation or reconstruction.
Based on the 2016 road assessment, Lysander’s roadways require $750,000 in repairs this year. Yager said 46 percent of the town’s road miles need some level of surface overlay treatment or reconstruction. Lysander’s average PCI has increased by one point over the 2015 assessment.
“We really don’t want to see our PCI get below 60. That means we’re really in poor shape,” Yager said.
Some roads will only require a basic milling and filling, but a few need a complete overhaul of the binder course. The largest concentration of roadways requiring complete reconstruction is in the Indian Springs neighborhood, Yager said.
The town has budgeted $700,000 for road repairs in 2017, which is equivalent to less than 1 percent of the total value of the town’s roadways, according to Yager. If road repairs continue on this budget schedule, Yager said, it would take nine years to meet the needs identified in 2016 by the Cornell program.
The total roadwork schedule for summer 2017 will cost $750,000. Yager said State Sen. John A. DeFrancisco helped the town secure a $50,000 grant to make up the difference. That grant will go toward improvements on Drakes Landing. (See sidebar for the full 2017 maintenance schedule.)
This is not the first time Yager has highlighted the gaps in the town’s pavement maintenance budget. In November 2015, Yager told the town board it should be spending more than $1 million annually on highway maintenance.
In 2013, information from the Cornell Local Roads Pavement Management Program study suggested the town required $8.5 million in road improvements. In 2016, that number had shrunk somewhat to $5.7 million in repairs.
Yager said the Cornell program’s budget report does not account for additional maintenance of roads currently in good condition. These roads deteriorate over time, so the town must look ahead to the next maintenance cycle.
One driver of road repair spending is the unpredictable cost of asphalt. Yager said there is news that an East Coast refinery that previously produced asphalt emulsion will no longer do so.
“We’ve tried to account for that because we do think there will be some increase,” Yager said. “We just don’t know how much that refinery not producing asphalt emulsion is going to affect what the prices do this year.”
Yager recommended the town do as much of its own hauling and trucking of road material as possible or use other municipalities’ services, resorting to contractors “only on an as-needed basis or in a worst-case scenario.”
In addition to the repairs identified by the Cornell program, the town also will make improvements to culverts on Willett Parkway using a $445,000 grant from the New York State Department of Transportation’s 2016 BRIDGE NY program. The grant program, which provides $200 million to local governments for bridge and culvert repairs, is part of NYSDOT’s $21.1 billion five-year capital plan.
