When Brookfield officials made their pitch for a referendum to fund residential street improvements last year, a key part of the plan called for the village to step up its efforts to maintain streets that weren’t identified for resurfacing as part of the $22 million effort.
On July 10, village trustees voted 6-0 to begin that maintenance plan in earnest by awarding a pair of contracts for large-scale pavement patching.
Palos Heights-based MYS Inc. will be paid $91,565 to patch concrete streets in an area bounded by Southview, Washington, Maple and Kemman avenues.
Meanwhile, Schroeder Asphalt Services was awarded a $56,852 contract to patch asphalt streets in roughly two dozen locations throughout the village, said Village Engineer Derek Treichel.
The Brookfield Department of Public Works last year began to perform pavement patching on concrete and asphalt streets, but the contracts awarded last week represent larger-scale patches and will supplement the village’s in-house work.
In the case of the asphalt patching work covered by the contract, sections of the pavement will actually be milled off and resurfaced with asphalt, allowing the village to avoid full-street resurfacing for several years, Treichel said.
In many cases, he added, there are asphalt streets where much of the surface would be good for another five or 10 years, except for small sections that are badly deteriorated.
“We can’t live with [those deteriorated sections] another five to 10 years,” he said.
According to Treichel, the asphalt patches range from 10-by-10-foot sections to full-street-width patches that are 100 feet long.
Work on the asphalt patching project will begin in early August and take about one to two weeks to complete, Treichel said.
Concrete patching will also begin in early August but will take much longer – up to two months – to complete. The concrete streets identified for patching are some of that area’s original streets but are generally in good condition, he said.
But the concrete streets tend to deteriorate near drainage structures, including intersections where sewer lines intersect. Many of the intersections in that area of town have been patched already, said Treichel, so most of the work in this year’s maintenance project is on the residential streets themselves.
Many of the patches are about 30 to 40 feet long and the full width of the street, so crews will work on half of the street at a time to keep roads open to traffic throughout construction.
The concrete patches could extend the life of those streets by 20 or more years, Treichel said.
In the meantime, most of the streets being resurfaced as part of the bond-funded road improvement campaign have had a first layer of asphalt applied and should have finished coats of asphalt within the next couple of weeks, Treichel said, although parkway sod replacement won’t take place until September or October, when the weather is cooler.
Work on the improvements to Congress Park Avenue and Deyo Avenue on the south end have started, while resurfacing work on Jackson Avenue from Grand Boulevard to Maple Avenue, which is being funded with the help of a federal Community Development Block Grant, on the north end is expected to begin in early August.
