Drivers along Ayd Mill Road in St. Paul call it one of the most pockmarked roadways in town.

Winter melt, age, traffic intensity, deferred maintenance and questionable construction all have taken their toll.

St. Paul city officials are continually grappling with the challenge of funding road repair for a growing residential and business population.

Outsiders sometimes make unfair comparisons to suburban streets, which typically draw less traffic and don’t allow on-street overnight parking. St. Paul, as one the oldest cities in the state, also has some of the oldest roads.

With spring beginning Tuesday, here’s a rundown city hall’s focus when it comes to fixing bad roads.

WILL THE CITY STILL FILL POTHOLES?

The city fills potholes seven days a week, year-round, day and night.

It’s just not very effective during the winter melt, when road maintenance crews are pouring a cold asphalt mix into holes whose cracks are filled with slushy ice and snow.

Water refreezes overnight, popping the asphalt right back up. Suddenly, a new pothole is born.

The sudden melt this month birthed a lot of them.

“This year, it all came at once,” said St. Paul Public Works Director Kathy Lantry. “All of the potholes were revealed in real quick succession. We could never get ahead of it.”

There’s good news: the city’s hot-mix asphalt plant reopened March 5, and six street maintenance crews have been added to the usual four, for a total of 10 crews working little else but potholes.

“We’re a 24/7 operation,” Lantry said.

HOW FAR DOES ST. PAUL’S ROAD BUDGET GO?

St. Paul’s road-repair funding doesn’t stretch all that far. It covers about eight miles per year out of 850 miles of city streets.

To fix roads, the city uses $12.5 million annually from its capital improvement or street reconstruction bonds and $13 million annually in municipal state aid. The latter, funded by the gas tax, license tab fees and other aspects of the state’s highway user fund, provides more money each year based on a combination of population and need, but road repair costs also go up annually.

The state funds include $9 million for road construction and $4 million for street maintenance, such as mill-and-overlay work, where the top two inches of a street is ground off and new pavement put in its place.

Direct street assessments to property owners cover some 20 to 50 percent of major road work, and outside grants from federal programs such as “Safe Routes to School” also fund some projects.

To give some perspective, St. Paul maintains 850 center-line miles of city streets.

Public Works performs mill-and-overlay treatment on five miles of roadway per year and completes full-on road reconstructions on another three miles of roadway.

Do the math, and at this rate it would take more than 100 years to rebuild all of the city’s streets.

St. Paul, behold the road work on tap or in design in 2018. pic.twitter.com/oQn6uqILHr — FredMelo, Reporter (@FrederickMelo) March 16, 2018

WHAT ABOUT ROADS ST. PAUL DOESN’T OWN?

Ramsey County, the Minnesota Department of Transportation and the federal government are expected to rebuild their own roads, highways and and bridges within St. Paul, though the city may pitch in for a portion of reconstruction costs.

St. Paul also may perform additional work through maintenance agreements.

West Seventh Street is a state road, and White Bear Avenue is a county road, but the city still responds to complaints from residents to fill potholes and deal with other immediate road hazards.

“Our street maintenance team goes where the complaints are, regardless of whoever owns the road,” Lantry said.

The potholes that generate the most calls and emails get some priority, though city street maintenance crews do their best to fill them as they spot them. St. Paul maintains its own pothole complaint line, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, as well as an email address specific to pothole complaints. The city’s street-maintenance division can be reached at 651-266-9700, or by email at potholes@ci.stpaul.mn.us.

HOW ARE ROAD REBUILDS SCHEDULED?

In 1994, St. Paul Public Works set up a “Residential Street Vitality Program,” a schedule of residential streets that need to be rebuilt. Related Articles Minneapolis boy charged in shooting death of campaign worker

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The schedule is flexible and prone to change based on complaints from drivers and residents about road conditions.

These days, Public Works is trying to incorporate more data into its analysis, rather than tilting toward the loudest voices.

They’re studying average daily traffic, pavement conditions and other maintenance demands, including what projects utilities such as Xcel Energy have planned.

“It’s taking data, rather than public opinion, to figure out where to put our resources,” Lantry said. “We look at condition, and we look at where the traffic is.”

Here’s a fun fact: When picking which of two roads of similar condition to rebuild, the road that needs street lighting has at least a small edge.

“People expect lighting in a city,” Lantry said.

The Department of Public Works’ five-year capital improvement plan is online at tinyurl.com/Stp5Year.

WHAT KINDS OF STREETS DOES ST. PAUL REBUILD EACH YEAR?

The city tackles project areas — a series of east-west and north-south blocks within a particular corner of St. Paul — and the ratio of residential to arterial streets has shifted toward arterials.

Before 2014, St. Paul focused on three to five residential project areas per year.

Arterial streets such as Snelling Avenue and Wheelock Parkway were added to the “RSVP” list after the notorious melt of 2013-2014, when the city declared nine snow emergencies.

The street rebuilding program now rebuilds one residential area annually, as well as stretches of two or three arterial streets.

ARE THE ‘TERRIBLE 20‘ FINISHED YET?

Just about. There’s still more work ahead on Wheelock Parkway, Johnson Parkway and Battle Creek Road.

TOO LITTLE SEAL COATING?

In construction circles, there are those who advocate for seal coating streets every few years with hot liquid asphalt and graded aggregate.

The result almost instantaneously produces a waterproof membrane that can add years — or even decades, if applied routinely — to the life of a street. The goal is to delay complete street rebuilds, which are costlier and can tie up traffic for weeks.

Public Works attempts to seal coat about an eighth of the city each year, but not everywhere.

“A lot of jurisdictions don’t apply it to higher-volume roadways,” said Nick Peterson, the city’s Street Design and Construction engineer. “It’s simply most effective on residential streets. … And it’s a stopgap.”

The benefits of seal coating are questionable on heavily traveled major roads, where Public Works officials are more likely to call for a more intense mill-and-overlay treatment.

Seal coating provides a temporary solution on residential streets, but the city’s schedule keeps slipping.

HOW PAVEMENT CONDITIONS MEASURED?

The city uses an industry tool known as a pavement management system.

To help prioritize road rebuilds and major road repair, St. Paul Public Works sends interns and other staffers to walk a third of the city each year, taking inventory of road conditions.

The problem is, different workers may come up with different findings on the same stretch.

For the sake of uniformity, St. Paul this year will use a laser to measure road roughness, a new condition added to the inventory. The outside vendor is St. Paul-based GoodPointe Technology.

“We want to have really consistent criteria,” Lantry said. “We’re trying to take some of the subjectivity out of it.”

ROAD ALTERNATIVES

Advocates of transportation alternatives note that building new roads and reconstructing or expanding old ones isn’t the only way to get from Point A to Point B.

Telecommuting, on-street and off-street bike paths, public transit, ride-sharing and loosened zoning restrictions allowing more residences within walking distance of employment and commerce could all cut down on car travel, lessening the burden on city streets. Related Articles After man sentenced to 40 years in St. Paul murder, courthouse locked down and shots fired nearby

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Future residential neighborhoods such as the former Ford manufacturing campus in Highland Park are being designed with walkability and public transit in mind.

Critics worry that as the city’s population, job base and general popularity grows, transportation alternatives may not be enough to offset the increase in road miles.

That concern has sometimes overshadowed planning for the Ford site and the Major League Soccer stadium in the city’s Midway neighborhood.