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City gets cheaper deal on summer repaving
Changes to the repaving contract reduced its cost, a city official says.
YOUNGSTOWN — Less money won’t mean the city is paving fewer streets this summer.
The city hired the Shelly Co. of Twinsburg for $1,155,962 to repave portions of 57 streets, slightly fewer than the number of streets repaved in recent years. But the project’s cost is about $400,000 less than it’s been in the past few years.
There are a number of reasons why the cost is less, said Charles Shasho, deputy director of the city’s public works department.
The price of petroleum, a key component in asphalt, dropped from $131 a cubic yard last year to $121, he said.
Also, the city made changes to the contract it has to repave the streets to cut costs, Shasho said.
The city is permitting the Shelly Co. to include a ground-up, recycled pavement mix for 10 percent of the asphalt it uses on the street, Shasho said.
“It brings the cost down, and it helps the environment” by reusing materials without a decline in the quality of the asphalt, he said.
The city is also giving up its rights to the salvaged asphalt, which further decreased the cost, Shasho said.
“We maintained the right to retain all of it in the past, but we seldom did anything with it,” he said. “It’s valuable to the contractor because they can reuse it. That’s a factor that lowers the bid.”
The city’s annual street-repaving program will begin in late June and take up to 75 days to finish, Shasho said.
The Shelly Co. beat out two other companies for the repaving contract. Shelly’s $1,155,962 proposal was the lowest, but less than $14,000 separated the three bids for the work.
This is the fourth-consecutive year that the city awarded the repaving contract to the Shelly Co.
The 57 streets are equivalent to 25 lane miles. A lane mile is one mile long and 12 feet wide, Shasho said.
Among the streets to be repaved is Walnut between Front and East Federal, near the downtown post office.
Because a sewer line and then a waterline broke in that area late last year, the street remains torn up with blockades guiding motorists along the street.
The city couldn’t lay asphalt after the repair job was done because doing so in the cold doesn’t work, Shasho said.
“It was an inconvenience, but we maintained traffic,” he said. “We got a lot of complaints, but it would be difficult to put a temporary patch on something that big.”
Instead, the city waited to put it on its summer repaving list, Shasho said.
Shasho and other public works employees ride the city’s streets to determine which will be repaved.
The streets are rated on the amount of traffic they have and their condition, Shasho said.
skolnick@vindy.com