Inside Arvada

Inside Arvada's Pavement Program with Ben Sawaya

• City of Arvada • Season 1 • Episode 25

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Arvada's Pavement Program Manager Ben Sawaya gives an inside look at how the City maintains and repairs its 1,500+ lane miles of roads.

Ben explains the different types of work the program is responsible for, how they prioritize work, and how they address program challenges, stretching limited resources as much as possible to perform maintenance and rehab work throughout the vast network of roads. 

Learn more about the program and see the map of proposed work areas each year at arvadaco.gov/pavementprogram. Contact pavement@arvada.org with questions about work in your area.

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Visit us at ArvadaCO.gov/Podcast or email us at podcast@arvada.org.

Katie:

Welcome to Inside Arvada, the City of Arvada's podcast, where we bring you conversations with the people who make Arvada a thriving community. Hear stories about the past, present and future of Arvada through the lens of the city team members who help make it all happen. Explore the complex topics impacting our community, from the roads you drive to the water you drink, the parks where you play to what your neighbors think. Join us as we take you Inside Arvada.

Katie:

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Inside Arvada. We are really excited this week to talk to the Pavement Program Manager, ben Sawaya. Ben actually grew up in Arvada, as we'll hear toward the end of the episode, and has been working with the city now for 18 years. He started off in the parks department and then moved into a short stint with the streets maintenance team and then spent most of his time of those 18 years with the water operations team. In 2023, he moved into his current role as the pavement manager for the pavement program, and that's what we'll be talking with him about today and, as always, I'm joined by my co-host, sean. Hey, sean.

Sean:

Hi Katie. Yeah, very insightful interview today with Ben about a topic I know our community really cares a lot about, so I hope they find it as informative as I did. I really appreciated the final question that we asked Ben before the lightning round about clearing up some misconceptions and specifically about you know, we'll repair a road and then we'll come back maybe a couple of years later and do some more work on it and why we're doing that, and so with that we'll hand it over to the interview. Thanks so much for joining us, ben. Let's begin by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do for the city.

Ben:

Sure, my name is Ben Sawai. I'm the pavement manager at the city of Arvada, so I manage the pavement management program and we plan all of the maintenance and rehabilitation projects for the street network that the city contracts out each year. And yeah, that's what we do.

Katie:

And as we get started, I'll just mention city-owned streets so we've, I think, talked about this with Keith too around snow plowing, but CDOT roads and anything that's county road isn't ours, so just to caveat that. But anyways, tell us a little bit more about the pavement management program and what exactly it is you all do and what types of work you do.

Ben:

Sure. So we maintain the city street network, which consists of over 1500 lane miles of paved roads, and we have three main areas that we work. The first is maintenance, so surface treatments and things we put on the pavement to keep good streets in good condition as long as possible. The second is pavement rehabilitation, so that's our mill and overlay projects, reconstruction, taking a street in poor condition and bringing it back to life, making it good. And the last area is concrete replacement. So when we go to do a like a mill and overlay project or reconstruct a street, we go in typically the year before, one to three years ahead and we do concrete replacement and we update curb ramps, we replace damaged cross pans and curb gutter and sidewalk as needed to support that paving project.

Katie:

Yeah, we have a go ahead, or there's kind of different types of seals that you'll put on different depending on the type of road, where mill and overlay is like grinding down the road and repaving it.

Ben:

Exactly so some of the common treatments that we do. We have crack seal, which is just sealing the cracks. It kind of looks like a black stripe on the street, you see that. And then there's full surface treatments where we actually coat the entire surface, like in slurry seals or chip seals, cape seal, things like that. And then, yeah, of course, the rehabilitation. You're probably more familiar with the mill and overlay, or reconstruction, where we're resurfacing.

Sean:

And we've got a pavement management program webpage that explains all these different treatments and it also has a great map that shows exactly where in the city we're doing all these sort of treatments and on which streets. How do we pick where we're doing which streets and which sort of treatments?

Ben:

Yes, we have some pavement management software it's called Road Matrix and with that we collect data each year. We do a third of the city every year, so we have good current data for our entire network, which helps us to evaluate all the streets and assess their condition, cost effectiveness, trying to get the most out of our streets and stretch every dollar as far as we can, which is why we prioritize pavement maintenance and all the surface treatments that we do. That's really where our money goes the farthest, so you'll see us plan those projects every year. That's a really important. One of the main factors that we consider is the functional classification of the street heavier traffic and higher speed limits, where the consequences of failure, the consequences of having poor pavement quality, are more severe. So those are some of the things that we consider.

Ben:

And then another thing that people don't often think about is utilities. So in most of our streets we have water mains and sewer mains buried underneath our street, and that's one of the things that we look at. There's parts of our water network, for example, that have been updated with PVC water mains, and then there's other parts with older pipes that are more likely to leak and that are actually maybe targeted for future water main replacement. So we look at that and we consider the possibility of having an issue, either an issue with the water system or a future project to upgrade the system to replace the water main. And either way, if we go in and pave that street today and then within the next few years somebody comes in and has to excavate and tear up the new street, that's kind of money down the drain. So we look at things like that and we try and be efficient in coordinating and collaborating with other city projects like that.

Katie:

Not a water project, I don't think. But similarly is kind of how you've kind of waited to work on oak and maybe sims. I know oak for sure because of, like, all the work happening on 72nd I believe.

Ben:

Yeah, it's very common for us to kind of put a project on hold when there's utilities were planned, so that, yeah, we pavement. We always want to go last. So if there's there's utilities projects or traffic projects or anything else going on, uh, we'll try and wait until all that is done, so that when we put that new pavement down it will last a good long time.

Sean:

Seems like the general approach to maintaining pavements, all like kind of take care of your body, right. It's a lot easier to do some minor maintenance and keep things going well than it is to maybe go and do some surgery right. Absolutely, it's kind of similar, I would think yeah.

Katie:

Yeah, I always think about like car maintenance too, yeah, that too, um kind of think about it as like doing those cost effective, low, um kind of less resource intensive maintenance work helps keep roads good, extends the life of the road for a long time. Um, and that costs um.

Ben:

the rehab work is just cost intensive and yeah, yeah, and even with the rehab work there's, there's kind of an ideal time to do it. And then where, if you miss that window, it gets more and more expensive and you see more and more need for like full depth patching and reconstruction versus just a mill and overlay, and the cost is significantly greater when you miss that window. When you miss that window, and that's where, unfortunately, we find ourselves in a situation where we have a lot of streets that are kind of in that window or past that. So there's a little bit of a dilemma for us between cost effectiveness and kind of doing the worst first and not leaving anybody behind but taking care of the streets that are in really bad condition.

Katie:

Yeah, and that's a good segue because we hear a lot from folks about the road outside of their home or that they're dissatisfied with the quality of the roads that they maybe travel every day and often that's kind of the neighborhood, local road that doesn't get prioritized quite as highly as those arterial roads or the roads everybody travels across the city and we've heard through like the annual community survey, lots of other communication channels, that folks feel that way and as a city team we also see that and are faced with addressing that problem and want to, you know, improve the quality of roads. But there's a lot of challenges with that and you're kind of speaking to some of that. Can you share a little bit more about kind of how we've, what are the challenges that the program faces?

Ben:

Sure, Well, first I just want to kind of validate folks and what we've heard, you know, as far as being dissatisfied with the road quality in the city, Because I can say I'm not satisfied with the road quality in the city and I think I can speak for our team when I say that we want to do better, we want to improve the pavement quality in the city.

Ben:

But some of the challenges, so the biggest obstacle right now is funding. We have a big like backlog. So, like I mentioned, a lot of the streets in the city and especially the local roads, our neighborhood streets, are in need of very costly rehabilitation and we just can't do everything all at once. So that's the biggest challenge is trying to secure additional funding to kind of speed up the process, because progress is just really slow in those local neighborhoods. Really slow in those local neighborhoods because, as I mentioned, we're trying to prioritize first maintenance and keeping good streets good and then rehabilitation on our arterials and collectors and progress is just really slow when it comes to locals and that rehabilitation. So that's the biggest challenge.

Katie:

Yeah, I think that for me kind of makes me think of this idea that sometimes we hear the kind of feedback that people feel like their neighborhood is forgotten. And it's not that it's forgotten just because it hasn't seen work in 30 years. It's that those local roads just really take longer to get to. And, like you mentioned before, it's not that we don't know about it, it's not that we haven't identified it, it's how do we work across all those different?

Ben:

spaces. It's definitely not forgotten. You're on our radar and you're not alone. There's just a lot of streets that are in the same boat and I guess, to kind of address that, as far as the forgotten neighborhoods, we're, we're focused on being cost-effective. We also realize that we can't just uh neglect part of the city if it's, if it's deteriorated to the point where it's no longer cost-effective to maintain we're, we're not just going to leave it behind, so we do some worst. First, uh, rehabilitation on local roads every year.

Sean:

Uh, to kind of address that and so, yeah, we've heard from our community that they're not super satisfied with the conditions of our roads, and so it's not a secret, right. But I'm curious, because of the climate that we live in and the snow that we get and the freezing and the whole pattern there with the freezing and thawing, how do our roads compare to some of our neighboring cities, that similar environment?

Ben:

Yeah, so you mentioned the weather and kind of the freeze-thaw, and that's definitely a factor, but it's also a factor that our neighboring cities deal with. We're not great. We're not great. The Colorado Asphalt Pavement Association publishes a report each year for local agencies and their pavement quality and some other criteria, but we're on the bottom tier, our pavement quality needs improvement and we can't really speak to as kind of present day how we got there necessarily.

Katie:

But one thing we were talking about a little bit before this is like that the program has really kind of like shifted or been adaptive and flexible to coming up with kind of a new strategy for addressing a really large road network. Addressing a really large road network and what used to be that you could really focus on just doing, or we don't know why. They've maybe focused on more funding toward the mill and overlay and the rehab, waiting till that work needed to be done, and now we're kind of focusing on well, we know it's a lot more cost effective. We can stretch those dollars a lot further if we keep good roads and in good condition for longer by doing the maintenance work, and so that has kind of shifted as a mentality and will hopefully help us kind of make progress in the long run, even though, like we just talked about, that takes longer on those local roads.

Ben:

Absolutely. Yeah, as we've grown, the program I think has come a long way. The the program, I think, has come a long way. We're we're actively doing a lot of research and networking to keep up with with best practices and with the latest, uh, you know, research and technology and, uh, we've learned a lot about maintenance and how important that is and doing the right treatment at the right time to really maximize the life of every street and utilize the budget to maximize results.

Katie:

Yeah, that's great. Well before we kind of move on to the lightning round and everything, there's work going on this year and so we want to let folks know when the pavement program is in your neighborhood. It can be disruptive, just like any construction can be, and so there's some things that can help the pavement program to move as quickly and efficiently through the neighborhood as possible. What are some things folks should know?

Ben:

Yeah, first check the website We've got all our planned work on there. And then just look for the website We've got all our planned work on there and then just look for the communication. So you'll see door hangers and you'll see us out and about and we'll be getting all the communication out as well as we can. So just look for that and then if you do have any concerns or any issues, just reach out and talk to us. And then, if you do have any concerns or any issues, just reach out and talk to us. No-transcript so just reach out through AskARVADA. Or uh, uh, pavement at arvadaorg is another uh good option. But or just call the city and and we'll get you to the right people.

Katie:

But yeah, just uh yeah we can put that info in our show notes for everybody, um, about kind of how to get in touch with the pavement program, the, the website, of course, and you all put out no parking signs to make sure cars get moved. That's a big one. They occasionally have to tow a car and they just move it to the like neighboring street, which is kind of like an awkward thing for people. But it's easier if you can just get your car out of the way. And the feedback I heard this year was, particularly if you know you're going to be out of town, get your car moved beforehand. And so those are some things.

Sean:

And if you're not sure when, it's all good advice and things that you and your team do, so do you hear some common misconceptions? Yeah, absolutely.

Ben:

There's a couple things we hear a lot. One is you know why are you paving this street? You just did it two years ago and you know this other street's in really bad shape, why are you spending money on that? I just I want to clarify that there's a big difference between maintenance and rehabilitation. So, once again, the the maintenance is surface treatments that we put on top of the pavement to maintain it in good condition for as long as possible. So and the research suggests that the sooner the better. Like once you resurface a street so say you did a mill and overlay project or you reconstructed it the sooner you can go in and kind of cover it up or put a surface treatment on it to preserve it, the better off you're going to be. So you'll often see us Go and do a slurry seal, for example, on a street that was overlaid maybe three years prior. Anyway, that's just one thing I wanted to clear up. If you have any questions about that or about the work that we're doing, we're happy to talk to you about that.

Ben:

The other one is concrete, another common misconception we get a lot of calls from people who have sidewalk adjacent to their property that's in poor condition and they're wondering if the city is going to replace that, and so I just want to clarify that, while we do a significant amount of concrete replacement with our program, you know and we coordinate that with our pavement rehabilitation projects the municipal code in Arvada does clearly state that the concrete curb, gutter and sidewalk that is adjacent to a property is the property owner's responsibility, is adjacent to a property is the property owner's responsibility.

Ben:

So we don't actually, uh, the city doesn't take responsibility for that. We don't have a program just for going out and fixing uh like damaged sidewalks. So, uh, happy to field those questions, though, and then, because we are doing a fair amount with our program, I would say before you go and replace that or have it repaired, you can give us a call and just see what our plans are for the foreseeable future, the next few years, if we're going to be there anyway, and it's something that we would definitely catch with the pavement program, and we could save you some money and you could wait for us to come through and get it done.

Sean:

Yeah, that's some great info that I think a lot of folks will find very helpful and useful.

Katie:

And I don't know. Just to clarify a little bit more on that, one is the main reasons that you're going in and doing concrete is for the ADA. I'm totally blanking on what it stands for.

Ben:

Accessibility.

Ben:

So, yeah, I can talk about that a little bit. So there's basically three reasons that we would replace concrete with this program, with the pavement management program. The first is ADA compliance. Ada compliance so when we alter a street, so if we do a mill and overlay or we reconstruct a road, we're obligated legally to make sure that the curb ramps are compliant at the time of our project. So a lot of our older curb ramps are not up to current standards so we have to go in and replace those before we can do a mill and overlay project. So that's a big part of our concrete program is just ADA compliance.

Ben:

And, specifically for curb ramps, is like drainage issues or any severely damaged concrete where, say, we don't have anything to pave up against because the concrete is so damaged or it poses a drainage issue that would potentially compromise the structural integrity of our new street. We would want to go ahead and repair that ahead of our project to kind of protect our investment. And then, lastly, sort of while we're there, we will do displacements. So if there's like tripping hazards or concrete that's displaced, we're trying to catch those while we're there. We're trying to catch those while we're there. So we are doing a lot of a fair amount of sidewalk replacement just based on those criteria.

Katie:

Thanks. I think that's something people care a lot about. So I just wanted to make sure that there was a little bit of clarity of what kind of we do, but how it is tied always to where you're going to have work happening is tied always to where you're going to have work happening. So really quick last we're going to move into the lightning round here and do these quick questions for folks to get to know you a little bit better. So first, what is your favorite thing about Arvada?

Ben:

I'd say it's home. I grew up here. It's not just my home, it's my kids' home. I have siblings, parents, grandparents that live in Arvada, a lot of friends and family, so to me that's the best thing about it.

Katie:

Yeah, what was your first, last or best concert?

Ben:

My last concert was actually at the Arvada Center, and it was the High Kings and Gaelic Storm.

Katie:

Nice.

Ben:

Yeah, it was fun.

Katie:

We just were talking to Sarah about the Arvada Center a couple weeks ago. What brought you to Arvada?

Ben:

My parents. I was born here, so I grew up in Arvada, I think you're our first born here.

Katie:

One. I think you're our first born here one, so that's a good one. What was your first job?

Ben:

My first job was as a baseball umpire when I was 14.

Katie:

Cool yeah, getting yelled at by parents. Yep.

Ben:

What's been your favorite project since you've been with the city? I think the one I'm working on right now. Actually, I've had a lot of fun projects when I was in utilities and done a lot of projects that I've enjoyed over the years, but right now I'm working on a pavement management plan, a five-year plan, trying to plan out the next five years for maintenance and rehab and concrete work and, uh, using our pavement management software and all the data that we have and, um, yeah, I'm enjoying that. There's a lot that goes into it and I'm just excited about it and trying to execute the plan once it's completed.

Katie:

Nice. Yeah, it'll be great to have that in place. Well, Ben, thanks so much for joining us today. It was great to have you on.

Ben:

Absolutely Thanks.

Sean:

Ben.

Ben:

Appreciate it.

Katie:

And, as always, we love to hear from you, all our listeners. Please stay in touch with the show. You can text us with that link at the top of the episode or email us at podcast at arvadaorg. Do you have questions for Ben or any of our other past guests, things you'd like to hear going forward? Reach out, we love to hear from you. Like to hear going forward? Reach out, we love to hear from you. And some news and upcoming events.

Katie:

This week we have the city each year flushes a third of the water mains, which essentially looks like they open up the fire hydrants to kind of flush the water in those mains after the winter season is over, where there's less water use happening.

Katie:

And this just is a maintenance process to help maintain high quality drinking water.

Katie:

And so you can, if they're working in your neighborhood, you can occasionally experience a slight and temporary discoloration in the water and the water is completely safe to drink still, and it's just recommended that you open up your cold water faucet tap and allow the water to run for a couple minutes till it clears out water faucet tap and allow the water to run for a couple minutes till it clears out. And so this year they're working mostly in the south and eastern parts of the city and there's a map on our website so we'll be sure to link to that and some more information about why they do this in the show notes. And then we mentioned last time, just to reiterate for folks, that the city partners with Resource Central to offer discounts on some water saving programs to help our water customers save money and conserve water, and so a lot of the programs sell out or fill up and so we encourage folks to look at those programs at resourcecentralorg and we'll put a link to that as well.

Sean:

Yeah, and, as we mentioned last time, the city is looking for feedback on the Arvada report. That's the printed publication that we mail to every resident and business in the city every two months, and so we encourage you to fill out that survey. It was in the last edition. You can also go online at arvadagov and fill out the survey there. We'd love to get your feedback on what you'd like about the Arvada report and what sort of improvements we can make. We'll link to that in the show notes as well. And then, finally, the Arvada Reservoir is set to open soon, on April 1st. You can go online and purchase your passes at arvadacogov slash reservoir.

Sean:

Thank you so much to our guests today. Ben Sawaya, be sure to listen to our next episode, where we'll have two guests on the Executive Director of Ralston House, don Mosley, as well as the Executive Director of Victim Outreach Incorporated, jennifer Griffin. Stay in touch with the podcast. You can visit our website at arvadacogov slash podcasts. You can subscribe to the show on whatever platform you prefer, and you can always reach out at podcasts at arvadaorg to ask questions or provide feedback or suggest future guests. Thank you to everyone for listening. We encourage you to subscribe, rate and review and share with your family, friends, coworkers and neighbors. Today's podcast, as always, was recorded and edited by Arvada Media Services, and today's fun fact is that in the last 24, 25 years, the city has gone from owning and maintaining roughly 800 lane miles to more than 1,500 lane miles, nearly doubling the city's road network.

Katie:

Whoa.