WOW! What's with the streets in Miles City? Almost every street you drive down has at least 1 pothole if not a half a dozen! there is a huge front end eater on the corner of 7th and pleasant by the post office. What is it going to take to get the "obstacle" coarses fixed?

Probably raising taxes would help.

Yikes! I was just going to say "money," but you're probably right.

Maybe some of the money and time spent on 'cleaning up Miles City' should have been spent on the streets instead of peoples so called junk in their yards. Honestly before I moved here and was a 'visitor' to Miles the last thing I ever noticed was what was in peoples yards cause I was to busy watching for potholes in the streets!!

How much rain have you had in the last month? Do you actually think it's worth the time to fix potholes now... then again in a month?

Now, now, Buck. Applying actual logic to an issue will just get you in trouble.

Silence, Verily I say unto ye --- that I seriously doubt Benjamin ever used the word "Yikes" in his long, productive and illustrious life. Other than that, I look forward to your postings and I hope you prove worthy of your namesake.

That does seem to be a problem here.

We do have a lot of potholes and areas of broken pavement this year. An unusual spike in water main breaks over the winter are the primary cause. The potholes will be repaired but you'll need to be patient. The City's run out of "cold mix" asphalt, a short-lived and expensive ($90/ton) stop-gap material that must be hauled from Glendive if and when the paving contractor decides to make it. Cold mix repairs last anywhere from 1 to 3 years. Meanwhile, the public works crews are filling holes with gravel until we can re-stock.

There's a lot of paving scheduled in the City this summer using "hot mix" asphalt ($80/ton), which can last 5 to 10 years and costs less than cold mix. A mobile asphalt plant is set up near our paving project and extra hot mix may be hauled and applied by our crews for patch repair. We use that approach whenever we can.

But there's a very cool alternative to cold mix that I'm hoping the City Council will agree to try in the coming year - asphalt recycling. A German company builds a mobile machine that eats large broken chunks of old asphalt, heats them up in a hopper with a granular additive and augers out fresh hot mix on-site at a cost of about $15/ton. The City of Bozeman has been using the Begala Asphalt Recycler for a few years and they love it.

The list price for the equipment is $180K but by my calculations, given the amount of cold mix that we typically purchase, the City could pay for this machine in its second year of operation.

If you hate potholes like "GLM", support recycling and hate pouring assessment dollars down a rathole, I hope you'll contact your City Councilman and lobby him this month to invest in the asphalt recycler. We're about to build our annual budget.

Seems to me the 180K would be better spent replacing water mains so you don't have pot-holes in the first place.

That would seem to make sense except for one inescapable fact: When it comes to replacing water mains or sewer lines, $180,000 is a drop in the bucket (npi). $180,000 may sound like a lot of money, but it isn't anywhere near what it will take to repair and/or replace the old underground lines. So, until the funds are available to make significant improvements to those underground systems, it actually makes sense to find a more affordable and efficient way to patch the potholes -- unless you like the idea of being reported as a missing person last seen entering the intersection of 7th and Pleasant in a '97 F-150.

[This message has been edited by Steve Craddock (edited 6/6/2008).]

What's a rough estimate for repairing the lines?

Pigeons and potholes, wouldnt be Miles City without 'em!