HASSO HERING

A perspective from Oregon’s mid-Willamette Valley

Behold ‘new’ streets in this old neighborhood

Written June 30th, 2021 by Hasso Hering

At the corner of Willamette Avenue and Chicago Street on Monday evening: Note the new surface.

When you’re on a bike, the quality of the road surface below your tires is something you notice. And on the evening of June 28, the hottest day in recorded history in the Willamette Valley, the newly surfaced streets in Albany’s Willamette Neighborhood caught my attention.

Here’s a video report:

This is a neighborhood on Albany’s eastern riverfront that was developed between 1940 and ’50, judging by the construction dates of some of the houses I looked up.

I asked Kristin Preston, the operations manager in Albany Public Works, to confirm what I took to be a chip-seal treatment of maybe a dozen blocks of the streets in the area.

“Yes, they were chip sealed due to their poor condition, which was deteriorated and starting to pit and have ruts,” she responded by email. “These streets in this neighborhood are unimproved, meaning they do not have sidewalks, curb, gutter, etc., and chip sealing is the main maintenance that these types of streets get.”

My speculation in the video about this resurfacing project being connected with the current construction of 120 apartments on the riverfront turned out to be off base. Apparently it was just these streets’ turn.

“We have an annual chip seal program where we look at street conditions, maintain a list of roads that need it and prioritize,” Preston wrote. “As you can guess, the need often exceeds the available funding.”

What about the cost?

“The City typically has a budget of about $30,000 for this purpose, and we have agreements with Benton, Polk, and Linn County road maintenance departments that do the work (and that’s about what this work costs).”

Albany has a longstanding and much-discussed issue with falling behind on street repairs and never catching up.  Chip-sealing — laying down oil and covering it with gravel — is cheap, but it’s not the accepted or recommended solution for streets that once were fully paved and have been breaking up and patched in the decades since.

But it seems to work in cases like this by keeping unimproved streets passable without huge expense. (hh)





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