First Selectman Pat Llodra and Public Works Director Fred Hurley sat down with the Board of Finance on February 9 to try to unravel some confusion that has developed regarding premature road “delamination,” which originally resulted in postponed spending for local road projects in the coming year’s budget.

“There was a fix of sorts possible, which is new information for us,” Mrs Llodra said. “We didn’t want to throw a lot of money at it until we were certain that we had some understanding about the problems with delamination.”

She said with an understanding of the problem, and a proposed fix, it was time to boost capital investments in road repairs by $1 million, as well as an operational bump in the annual request to help restore original annual budget allocations to maintain a minimum number of road repairs.

Mrs Llodra asked for an adjustment in the CIP, and asked the finance board to look at other ways to achieve capital goals while making a one-time capital investment to shore up planned major road projects.

Mr Hurley said that over the last seven to eight years, he began noticing premature degradation or destruction of the top layers of new road surfaces, or delamination. He said his department was looking at a change that occurred statewide about eight years ago, which reduced the petroleum base of asphalt being used.

At the same time, the Highway Department was suspicious of treated salts that might have greater penetration into asphalt surfaces at lower temperatures. But Mr Hurley fixed the problem to road surfaces that had been paved with recycled asphalt by using what he called “super paver virgin stone,” material that does not use recycled materials that tend to degrade more rapidly.

“So we feel more comfortable now being more aggressive in the paving portion of our road program,” Mr Hurley said. “We’re going to start getting the 10, 12, 15 years that we used to get from a resurfacing. It’s a little hard to plan when you were getting five years instead of the 15 years we were used to.”

Mr Hurley said the several local manufacturers of asphalt in Connecticut using state specifications for the classes of materials were resulting in similar delamination in many towns. He said the ultimate goal is creating a sustainable road surfacing program that will allow for annual operating budget expenditures versus making a one-time bonding initiative to cover a massive restoration initiative for local roads.

“We are trying to get to the 25 or 30 year mark for underlying infrastructure, and 10 to 15 years for the travel surfaces,” Mr Hurley said.

Mrs Llodra said the Highway Department has a 20-year road plan to complete the entire community’s 275 mile road network, and would need $2 million to “even come close” to restoring an average of 17 miles of roadways each year.

Grand List Error

The Board of Finance also learned that an administrative error on a grand list personal property declaration resulted in a significant drop in anticipated revenue next year. At the same time, finance officials were told that public works officials were poised to request funding for town road repairs be restored.

During Finance Director Robert Tait’s report to the board last week, he noted that a significant preliminary increase in anticipated grand list revenues had to be dialed back by about half, to 0.75 percent, after a discrepancy was discovered in a massive electric utility personal property declaration.