How Calhoun County Gets Roads Ready For Summer Construction

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I'm Richard Pyatt.
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Welcome back inside Calhoun County.
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This is the official podcast from Calhoun County, Michigan.
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Typically, we find, I would say, that there is a lot of interest about what goes on road construction-wise in our county, especially in the months where it's uh ripe for the picking.
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Is that the uh expression?
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Anyway, the warm weather months, of course, are when our road crews get to work in earnest.
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Christine Parsons oversees the road department in Calhoun County, and she's back to talk to us about 2026.
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Hi, Christine.
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Hi there, Richard.
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Okay, so it's springtime.
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That means what comes first on your agenda?
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What comes first?
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We are just finishing up winter maintenance.
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We are working towards construction season.
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So it's sort of that, you know, important in-between season where we are buttoning up all those winter maintenance items and all of the things that we did from November to March, and now working our way towards construction season.
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So there's a lot of different pieces and parts that go into getting us ready for that.
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Yeah, I I think there was a little snow pushing going on in those months to which you refer, right?
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Just a little bit of snow.
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Man, it was a busier winter than we've had for a few, wasn't it?
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Yes.
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I would say it's probably, gosh, given the last decade, probably one of the heavier winters we've had in 10 years.
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Oh my decade.
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Okay.
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So what did that mean for you?
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We used more assault, we pushed more snow, probably had a repair or two to a truck or two that uh maybe popped up.
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You know, this is what comes to my mind.
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What what happened uh over the last few months that was challenging?
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Anything?
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Oh gosh.
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You know, there's a lot of different things that that are involved with making sure that we're able to respond to winter maintenance appropriately.
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The number one thing, as you mentioned, is making sure our fleet is operational and we have a really uh excellent fleet.
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We have a lot of newer vehicles, but still, nonetheless, winter maintenance is hard on trucks, on people.
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So uh making sure that those trucks are going out the door with all of their issues fixed and that anything that does happen has been proven that it will happen.
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But there's always a number of things that happen out there day to day.
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Winter maintenance is hard on vehicles with all the salt, with all of the beet juice, with the cold temperatures.
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It's difficult, particularly for like hydraulics and electrical systems.
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So making sure those are working properly, um, making sure that our mechanics are in there and getting those fixed and our drivers are communicating, you know, what has gone wrong with their vehicles, whether it was incidental or you know, just completely out of, you know, the blue.
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But um making sure that the fleet's running properly and our drivers as well are part of our, you know, important key efforts to make sure that we get the snow off the road, that they're here, that they're healthy, that you know, they have the appropriate amount of rest.
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We had a period where uh we had 31 days in a row of winter maintenance response, which is, you know, a much larger number than it has been for several years.
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So our drivers are very thankful that it is no longer winter, that we are moving into spring, and hopefully that means no more snow response.
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And so, as a part of that, with all of the salt cleanup, with all of the trucks, our trucks have to be de-winterized.
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So we take off some of the salters and the other pieces of equipment that are specific to winter maintenance, and we get them ready for construction season.
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So we're not quite to that point yet, but we are thinking about the timeline for when that will happen so that we can get ready for the construction season prep work that happens next.
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Yeah, an interesting point and one maybe folks hadn't thought of.
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These are the same trucks, folks, that are working in the winter that then work in the construction season.
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They just get modified a bit in order to accommodate whatever that job is.
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There's not a separate set of trucks for both uh periods of the year, right?
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No, no, they're the same trucks.
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They just have different pieces of equipment that come out of them after the winter, and those get cleaned up and put away and organized.
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And then so we have a winterization and a dewinterization period as we go into each season getting those trucks ready, you know, for whatever it is that we're going to be using them for.
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Yeah.
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All right.
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And I'm lingering on the notion of 31 days of winter maintenance.
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Think about that, folks.
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If you strung them together in a consistent stretch, that's a whole month of nonstop winter maintenance work that was going on in Calhoun County.
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And you um uh you were uh very modest, I suppose, on behalf of your drivers in talking about making sure they have rest in their well and all that.
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But can you imagine this is a significant effort, is it not, to uh make sure that you have coverage and that people are doing okay.
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Yes, it's it's that's a big part of what we have to think about here, making sure that we have all of our routes covered, that we are responding in the time frame that is both safe and effective, and also that people expect, because there are differing levels of service depending on the type of road.
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You know, of course, you want to make sure those state highways get hit quickly as well as the high volume primary roads, but people also need to be able to get in and out of their subdivisions.
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So it is a balance to make sure that we are hitting those roads quickly and effectively, that we have the drivers to do so.
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A lot of times when you have winter maintenance events, you have drivers coming in early, possibly staying late.
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So you know you don't want to exceed their maximum number of hours.
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You want to make sure they get enough rest at night.
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And it's hard on a driver to be in even a brand new truck all day long if you're in a truck driving, plowing snow for 12 hours.
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It's not just sitting there holding the wheel.
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You've got to be operating the belly blade, you've got to be operating the wing plow, you've got to be making sure that you're having the salts at the appropriate levels.
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So there's a lot that goes into it.
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And our drivers are very skilled individuals.
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And their uh focus is 100% of the time when they're doing that.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Well, hats off to them, especially with uh the kind of winter that we had, as you heard Christine say, uh, a more significant win winter, perhaps uh as much as so over the last 10 years.
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Wow.
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All right.
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So, of course, what happens when everything melts?
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We find potholes.
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And so now that's the focus, isn't it?
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Patching.
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Yes, potholes are we're in what we would call pothole season right now.
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So the hard part is when the snow starts to melt, it gets down into the road bed, and then it'll freeze back up at night, it'll bust off the road surface.
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So we are seeing potholes all over the place right now.
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And unfortunately, until the asphalt plants open consistently and are producing hot mix asphalt, which is, you know, hot as the name indicates, and it stays in the holes better, provides a better solution than cold mix, which can be used in colder temperatures, but it's not a good permanent long-term solution.
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That's all we have available in the winter is cold mix.
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So trying to fill holes right now before the asphalt plants open back up in about three weeks is tricky because it is a short-term solution at the moment.
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So we also have our spray patchers that can help us with that.
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They're all temperature dependent.
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And as we're starting to see the warmer temperatures, though, that helps us be able to put more permanent solutions in place.
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Once the plants open back up full time to produce the hot mixed asphalt, we'll be going really uh hardcore with our contractor patching program, which is where we bring in outside teams of pothole patchers to come in and help consolidate with our forces to really knock out those potholes as fast as possible.
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And even with, you know, 16 external crews and as many as our crews as we can have going, it'll still take every bit of probably two and a half months to get from the start of patching all the potholes to the completion, just because there are so many.
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And a lot of that is a function of road funding in Michigan and the availability of that funding to be everywhere you need it to be to fix all those roads back up into new shape.
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And the more we can fix roads, the less potholes you'll see.
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But even as you fix them, making sure that we are able to keep them maintained so those potholes don't come back.
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So it really is a balancing act.
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Yeah, and and you have to, I suppose, create a game plan, don't you, about uh which roads you're gonna get to first and how long it's gonna take to do that and move on to the next and which teams will do that.
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Uh, hence you see why it takes the amount of time it takes.
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Yes, we do have an order that we go and we try to do two townships at a time.
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We start in the areas that have the highest number of potholes in concentration so we can keep our crews close together.
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We have a mobile work site with 50 tons of asphalt that are the contractors can go and pick up asphalt from.
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And it instead of traveling all the way back to the plant across the county, they're able just to go to our mobile worksite, get the asphalt, get patching right there in those same townships and get back and make multiple loads per day to be able to get that put down.
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And then as we start to move further out the county, we are able to address all the potholes that are a little further away.
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And that the mobile worksite moves to accommodate the contractor patching operation throughout the months that we're doing that.
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Yeah, there you go, folks.
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It's a logistical consideration also.
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All of those pieces have to be working in uh concert with one another.
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Okay, so you fill those potholes and then move on.
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What's the expectation about how soon you might have to be back uh filling those holes again?
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Do they come apart sooner?
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I mean, think about the cars constantly pounding on that filler.
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Uh, are you happy with uh the technology these days?
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Does it last long enough?
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What's the purview on it?
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Oh gosh.
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I mean, it really depends.
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There's no one good answer to that question because depending on subsurface conditions, depending on the amount of traffic volume, you'll see places where we'll patch potholes and it doesn't get a whole lot of cars or trucks and it'll stay for a couple years.
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And then you'll see places where it gets a lot of traffic or there's a higher number of trucks than normal and or there's a lot of clay under the roadbed, and that clay may shift and move, and that will cause a pothole to open back up sooner rather than later.
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But typically I would expect if we patch potholes with our contractor patching program using hotniks, that you should not see those open back up before the fall when you start to get the freeze thaw cycles again.
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Ideally, they'll stay patched for a year to two years, just depending on conditions.
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It can open up sooner, it could last longer.
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So it really, there's not like a set answer to say it's definitely gonna last this long because there's a lot of variability on what that might mean.
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All right.
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Well, uh, would we hope it would be longer than shorter, but uh you get the point.
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Lots of different factors that could uh make the difference.
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All right.
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What kind of a season is this as you look ahead for trying to uh what's that expression, make hay while the sun shines and get the roads, the the big road projects done over the course of the available months we have in Michigan to do that.
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Is this going to be a heavy season, a moderate season?
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What's your view?
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Oh, I think it's pretty heavy season.
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We're really excited about all the road work that we have planned for this summer.
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So, in addition to our traditional federal aid program, which is the money that we get from the federal government through our state partners to do our sort of larger scale projects.
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We have our local work, and then that's being done in concert with the townships to make sure that their local works get addressed, and then also primary road projects and some bridge projects.
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So we have a lot going on this summer.
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We anticipate being very busy.
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We are replacing, completely replacing two bridges in Homer slash Albion Townships.
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One of them is on the border, so L Drive South and 25 and a half mile road over the south branch of the Kalamazoo River.
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Both of those will be replaced this summer.
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So while inconvenient for folks, what that means is these structures will not have to be closed when they deteriorate past the point of their usable life.
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So we're really excited.
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That's a lot of competitive funding that we were able to win for the county in a very competitive environment in bridge funding.
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There's a very minimal bridge funding compared to the amount of bridges that need repairs.
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So$6 million plus dollars to replace those two bridges down in Homer and Albion.
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So we're excited about that.
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We are doing a large amount of local road work as well.
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We have partnered with the townships to do over$6 million of local roadwork.
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So there's a lot of chip seal.
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There are some asphalt overlay projects, some mill and resurfacing projects.
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And we have record participation from those townships to be able to address their local roads.
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We are turning some roads back to gravel in partnership with townships to address sort of the right sizing of our network to make sure that maybe roads who are very low volume or who are in poor condition just from construction over time or, you know, with the way they were built, or just perhaps, you know, the amount of time it's been since anything was done to them construction-wise, those are being turned back to gravel.
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And then we're also adding new gravel to some projects, particularly in Burlington and Athens Township.
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So we're really excited about that.
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And then we're also moving forward with our primary road program to be able to address primary roads are typically our higher volume facilities.
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So addressing those higher volume roads outside of our federal aid program, those typically are where we get our big impact high-volume projects.
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This year, we're doing our project on Michigan Ave in Morengo and Sheridan Townships.
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And that is from 22 and a half mile to 25 and a half mile road.
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And then we are also doing a portion of Six Mile Road in Newton and Leroy Townships up to the Emmet Township line.
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And that's just the federal aid project.
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We also have a local project that we're really excited about that we are working with Leroy and Newton Townships on from B Drive South down to south of Boyd Drive to be able to repair that really deteriorated section of Six Mile Road.
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So we're really excited about that one, given that that's a vocal project.
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And a local project with shared partners is a little bit of a rare bird.
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So we're really excited to be able to have both townships work together and really improve that road.
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So it's going to be really nice once it gets done.
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We're excited to see that one move forward.
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Well, you're right.
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That does sound like quite a list.
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I want to go back to something you said about bridges.
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You said that it's a competitive process.
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By that you mean there's a finite amount of money in the state and the counties are competing for it.
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Is that right?
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Yes.
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Not just the counties, though.
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So we are in what's considered the Southwest region.
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So MDOT has the local agency bridge program that we submit for every year.
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You're allowed to submit now, you're allowed to submit for three bridges.
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So you submit your projects within your region, and then there's a council, a regional bridge council that decides like how many points your bridge should get if it should be awarded.
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So we compete against not just other counties in our region, which includes St.
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Joe and Kalamazoo and Barion, but we also compete against cities and villages as well.
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So it's not just seven other counties or six other counties.
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There's the village of Augusta or the city of Kalamazoo, and there's$50 million typically statewide, not just in our region.
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I would say the average bridge costs about$2 million to replace.
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We have 88 bridges, not all in bad shape, but you know, we have at least nine that are critical right now.
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So there's a very limited pot of funding for a very large amount of work that needs to be done, not just for us, but statewide in Michigan.
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And I'm sure it's more, it's a nationwide issue as well, because you're seeing a lot of bridges starting to reach the end of their useful service life, which is about 50 to 75 years.
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That's still a long time.
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Yes.
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If you imagine all the weight that goes over them and the beating they take, uh 50 to 75 years is uh is pretty good, it seems.
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But uh you illustrate the picture.
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There's a finite amount of money in all these bridges that are aging at about the same time, or at least in Calhoun County, you said 88.
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They're all in various levels of of uh maintenance need, I suppose.
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Yes, we have some that are brand new just replaced last year, and some that really need some work more immediately than others.
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So do you think we'll end up closing some of those before we get money to replace them?
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I hope not.
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Yeah, that's right.
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We sure hope not.
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That's kind of my worst case scenario.
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Right.
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You also talked about turning roads back into gravel.
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That's kind of a worst case deal too, isn't it?
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No, no, actually.
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I think that that the way that I like to look at that is there are some roads that um, you know, perhaps many years ago, the idea is always that asphalt is better.
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And I would not argue that asphalt is a bad solution, but in some places, perhaps, with the cost of construction, with the cost of asphalt, to be able to maintain a hard surface road is much more difficult than to be able to maintain a gravel road.
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So if I've got a uh a pothole in a gravel road, I can just run out there with a grater, touch it up, it looks good.
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You know, I can go out there as needed, touch it up, uh, may need to add some truckloads of gravel here and again periodically, but fairly low maintenance, easy to keep in decent shape with a paved road.
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Once it starts to get potholes and the base starts to get exposed, if it gets severe enough, I have to crush it back to gravel and repave it.
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And that's upwards of you know,$500,000 to$600,000 a mile to do something like that.
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So with the cost differential very high.
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And on some of these lower volume rural facilities that maybe you're only seeing, you know, 15 to 20 cars per day, and maybe a gravel road that can be maintained nicely is a much better solution than perhaps a paved road that cannot be maintained without substantial investment.
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Because a lot of these are local roads from both townships and residents.
00:17:15.839 --> 00:17:24.799
So what we want to try to do is find that balance where you have the right size of your system in terms of the mileage of gravel roads versus the mileage of hard surface roads.
00:17:24.880 --> 00:17:35.839
So I think it can be a real advantage for some folks, even if the idea is always asphalt is better, but is it better if it cannot be fixed in the long term if it's not an affordable solution?
00:17:35.920 --> 00:17:37.839
That that's kind of what I would pose.
00:17:38.319 --> 00:17:39.839
Well, point well taken.
00:17:39.920 --> 00:17:40.880
And there you are.
00:17:41.039 --> 00:17:47.279
It goes to show you sometimes our perceptions of of what is true uh may not be entirely accurate.
00:17:47.440 --> 00:17:48.079
There you are.
00:17:48.160 --> 00:17:50.079
My thought was, uh, nobody wants gravel.
00:17:50.240 --> 00:17:50.960
Maybe we do.
00:17:51.119 --> 00:17:59.599
And your illustration about the uh notion it's a lot easier to deal with some of the grading issues or the uh the potholes on a gravel road.
00:17:59.759 --> 00:18:00.480
I hear your point.
00:18:00.640 --> 00:18:01.519
You have control over that.
00:18:01.599 --> 00:18:05.519
You don't have to wait for a for a hot mix plant to open, that sort of thing.
00:18:05.599 --> 00:18:05.920
Yeah.
00:18:06.079 --> 00:18:06.400
Okay.
00:18:06.880 --> 00:18:14.480
So you listed a number of things that are going to happen this year, and folks uh might be listening, their heads spinning a little bit.
00:18:14.640 --> 00:18:16.319
They can keep track of this.
00:18:16.480 --> 00:18:20.240
There's a construction map as part of the road department website, right?
00:18:20.480 --> 00:18:31.440
Yes, we have on our mapping website within the road department's website, we have a construction projects map that shows the different projects and where they're taking place, township by township.
00:18:31.519 --> 00:18:43.440
And of course, if they have any questions, they're welcome to send us an email at rdinfo at calhouncountymi.gov, or they can give us a call at 269-781-9841.
00:18:43.839 --> 00:18:51.599
All right, 781-9841 or RDINF at Calhoun CountyMI.gov.
00:18:51.839 --> 00:18:55.680
If you want to send an email, ask questions, and take a look at that map.
00:18:55.759 --> 00:19:00.079
We'll link it in the show notes for this episode as well, so you can click through and have a look.
00:19:00.240 --> 00:19:02.240
Those things are really useful.
00:19:02.319 --> 00:19:09.599
And I should mention MDOT has a similar map too, you can look at for the bigger road projects and uh recommend that one too.
00:19:09.680 --> 00:19:15.440
Uh, but when it's at your fingertips, you can check that anytime before you're going out and know exactly what's happening.
00:19:15.599 --> 00:19:19.759
Or if you happen upon a project, how long is this gonna go on?
00:19:20.000 --> 00:19:22.319
This will tell you and you can uh have a look.
00:19:22.480 --> 00:19:24.720
All right, Christine, we always appreciate these updates.
00:19:24.880 --> 00:19:25.759
You were gonna add something?
00:19:26.079 --> 00:19:34.000
I was gonna add, if you have specific questions about a project, concerned about timeline or when it might be happening, you can always sign up for our Rave Alerts.
00:19:34.079 --> 00:19:39.200
If you go to our website, there's a box where you can sign up to have text messages sent to you or emails.
00:19:39.359 --> 00:19:47.039
And then we do a lot of our publication of our projects and like updates and notifications on social media, and that the rave alerts also push out to social media.
00:19:47.119 --> 00:19:56.240
So, social media, our Facebook page, is an excellent place to get like real-time live updates about what's happening day to day, week to week, project-wise during construction season.
00:19:56.559 --> 00:19:56.880
Okay.
00:19:57.279 --> 00:20:06.240
Calhoun countymi.gov, Calhoun County's website, look for the road department, and you'll be connected with these resources Christine is talking about.
00:20:06.480 --> 00:20:07.279
Thanks again.
00:20:07.519 --> 00:20:08.000
Thank you.
00:20:08.240 --> 00:20:14.400
Christine Parsons, director of the Calhoun County Road Department on Inside Calhoun County.
00:20:14.480 --> 00:20:21.039
You can also subscribe to this series where you get podcasts, and you'll get alerted when these episodes come available.
00:20:21.200 --> 00:20:22.079
Take care.