Havre's Mild Winter Contributing to Deteriorating Road Conditions

The deterioration of Havre's roads are being worsened by the mild winter, and the City of Havre Public Works Department is having difficulty keeping up with repairs.

"We're dealing with a lot of roads that have a lot of years in em, and a lack of funding to fix them in the way they need to be fixed," said Public Works Director David Peterson. Peterson sees many factors that make road repair particularly expensive in Havre. But this year the mild winter has made things worse.

"That really plays havoc with the roads," he said referencing the wildly varying temperatures Havre has seen this year. Peterson explained that when moisture gets under the roads the water will freeze during winter and expand potentially damaging the roads after it thaws.

In a year with a more traditional winter this freezing and thawing process would only happen once, with thawing starting in late spring. During that time, he said, the department would begin by fixing as many potholes as it can, until summer when the previous winter's damage can be evaluated and addressed.

This year the inconsistent temperatures have caused the freezing-thawing process to happen many times well before spring, Peterson said. As a result, the Public Works Department has begun its repair efforts much earlier than most years.

"We are in kind of pothole mode," he said. The department has conducted a capital improvement plan which found that the oldest parts of town, including the East End, are worse off than most. But the plan has identified places all over town suffering from road deterioration. He added that this winter, problem spots have appeared in areas that the department was not expecting.

"We are finding the worst parts, we're going in and fixing them," he said. "...that's really what we can do."

Part of what the department looks at when deciding what streets to prioritize, is the condition of the infrastructure beneath the streets. Peterson said that the aging below-ground infrastructure is part of the reason some of the deterioration happens. It is also the reason fixing some roads can be cost-inefficient.

"You don't want to go in and spend tens of thousands of dollars on street repair on a block then have to come back and dig it up because you've got a water main break," he said.

Peterson said he would like to repair that infrastructure before attempting to fix the streets, but the process is expensive, and the department cannot afford it. But the surface-level repairs the department can do are also increasingly costly.

"Realistically you're talking about 25 grand for an inch and a half overlay on the street, and that's probably on the shy side. 25 grand doesn't go very far, and you're not really taking care of the problem," he said.

One of the factors that make street repair so expensive is the cost of the materials needed to make asphalt.

"The big expense is the oil and the gravel," Peterson said. "...we do not have a lot of gravel in north-central Montana, it's a pretty valuable commodity and it's in demand." In addition to the raw materials, the department also faces a lack of needed equipment.

"We don't have the equipment, we don't have the big milling machines, we don't have the pavers, we don't have an asphalt plant, a lot of that is all contracted out," he said.

Peterson also cited the fact that the cost of the equipment the department can buy has risen dramatically in the past two decades, and that the department's funding has not risen to meet that demand.

"Our newest patrol, we just bought it this year was a 2001, so it's already 19 years old, and we spent about 90,000 dollars on that," he said. "We bought a new one in 1999, and we spent about 90,000 dollars."

Peterson said he believes that the only way to pay for the repairs the city needs is through reinstituting special improvement districts.

"In all reality, SID's is where it's at. That's the only way you're gonna do it," he said.

But regardless of how the department gets funding, its current efforts are restricted to fixing the street surfaces.

"It's really a Band-Aid," Peterson said, "...we're taking the worst areas and trying to fix em the best we can with the amount of money that we have."