New assessment aimed at providing planning tools amid rapid growth

(Seguin) — With continued population growth and development placing new demands on local infrastructure, Guadalupe County Commissioners Court on Tuesday received an in-depth presentation on the condition of its roads.

The assessment, conducted by Roadway Asset Services, showed the county has a Pavement Condition Index (PCI) of 75—considered solid but requiring proactive maintenance to avoid costly deterioration.

First sharing some insight on the county’s roads was Scot Gordon, the asset management engineer and current president of Roadway Asset Services.

“Just to go through some terms real quick, centerline miles, the county has 591 centerline miles. That’s over 7.2 million square yards. And to put that into perspective, if you were to pave a two-lane road, you could go all the way to Wichita, Kansas with the amount of pavement you have in this county. So, it is quite a bit of material that you guys need to maintain. Most of it is asphalt concrete. Only about 2.6 percent of that is pure, what we call hot mix concrete. Most of it is chip sealed. Some of it has a pavement section underneath it and some of it, is just chip sealed. It’s been built up over the years on county roads,” said Gordon.

Gordon says the findings are categorized so that the county can begin the budgeting and planning for the future.

“And we can break that down into percentage measurement. So you can quickly see what percentage of your county road network falls in each of these categories. So what you can start doing in a maintenance standpoint then is start looking at these satisfactory, fair, poor categories as satisfactory, maybe it’s time to go put crack sealing or surface seal down. When I get into fair, maybe I’m looking at more chip seals. a little bit more aggressive maintenance. When I get down into pour, I’m probably needing to put on overlays and put more structure into the roadway to sustain the loading,” said Gordon.

With a new list of rated roads, Gordon stressed the importance of early maintenance. He says this will be key to avoiding significantly higher repair costs later.

“The theory in pavement management is to try to treat it while it’s still in fairly good shape, putting seals, preservation type chip seals or slurry seals to protect the pavement structure. Think of it as painting your house. You’ve got the main structure — that’s a lot of money that you put down on the roadway. As the UV rays and the oxidation age that pavement, it’s going to start cracking more and more. So, if we can put seals on it early and protect it, it’s just like painting your house to preserve the structure. So, if you do that more frequently at a much lower cos — the whole thing is at $4 a square yard, I can put a slurry seal or chip seal down on the roadway. If I let it deteriorate down further, now I’m going to have to mill it out, overlay it, put in more structure, rebuild portions of the road. It can be up to $35, $40 a yard. So much more expensive if we wait,” said Gordon.

Douglas Burnside, Guadalupe County road and bridge administrator, also spoke before the commissioner’s court. He says this will be important for long-term planning, especially as Guadalupe County continues to rank among the fastest-growing areas in Texas and the nation.

“There’s so many different areas to touch on. We’ll start with what you’re talking at hand as far as the depth of how far, how deep we go to get these roads structurally sound. That’s all part of budget talks of how much money we’re willing to put into the roads, how much we need to put into the roads due to the influx of the community being the top 10 in America, top five in Texas all the time on the list of fastest growing counties. This whole process that we’re going through — so many different areas are going to be beneficial to us. There was kind of a sigh of relief when somebody saw the PCI network index was 75. I don’t consider that a relief. That’s where we need to be. And if we don’t put more into it because of our growth, we’re going to be playing catch up like San Antonio and all the other big cities. And it’s cheaper to do it now,” said Burnside.

Burnside says new tools from the assessment will also help the county hold developers accountable as the growth continues.

“As these developments come in, they’re going to plot these developments on this map so we can see what type, where the roads are when that development’s planning on coming through. If that road is at an 80 and that development starts, this is the ammunition we have that, hey, they need to — we’re going to see what it looks like in a year after, you know, 10, after 1,000 concrete trucks go rolling through there. We need to be able to track this and go back to these developers and say, look, we’re maintaining roads. You need to build these roads because you’re bringing in 2,000 people where we formerly had 20.’ And this is all a tool to do such a thing. There’s so many different areas to expand all this,” said Burnside.

Burnside says the issue of roads is not always an easy discussion to have but added that the county will need to balance the fixing of its deteriorated roads.

“We’re not just going to go out to the red areas and go, ‘we got to fix those.’ We’re going to have to look at where the community is growing and possibly get ahead on some of these roads rather than repair the ones that are really bad. And I know that’s not what a lot of people want to hear. Why aren’t you repairing the ones that are worse? Well, because we can spend X amount of money and get 10 miles ahead or the same amount of money is only going to take care of 1 mile. So, we have to weigh all those options, and all these tools are the beginning of that process of us being proactive instead of reactive in the county,” said Burnside.

Officials noted that additional work is underway to better understand local soil conditions and their impact on roadway durability. The road trip around the county was made with a roadway asset collection van. The van is equipped with the latest intelligence and imagery technology to measure distressed surfaces and their distribution throughout the county.