City analyzes Russellville street repair needs
After eight years of hard work, Russellville City Councilman David Palmer unveiled his city street presentation at this week’s Russellville City Council meeting.
The presentation included a spreadsheet with information on every street segment inside the Russellville city limits, each with a grade based on condition.
“This will just give the city a way to prioritize projects and look at the cost of repairs,” Palmer explained.
Palmer said the spreadsheet contains information about each road and how expensive each repair would be to make, with three different price options.
“The good thing about this is it is here from now on, and it doesn’t ever have to be redone – only updated,” Palmer said. “This is my gift to the city, and as you can tell, I’m excited about it.”
The presentation also included a link to a map of Russellville city limits, with each street colored based on the grade it received. Palmer said cost is broken down by street or by district. “I think this is an awesome thing that is certainly going to be beneficial to the council and the citizens of Russellville.”
According to Palmer’s algorithm, the average grade on streets inside Russellville city limits is 80 percent, which Palmer attributes to grants the city has been able to take advantage of in recent years.
“This information will also help us with getting additional grants because we aren’t just tossing around numbers,” Palmer said. “We will be able to show the people in Montgomery real data that is updated and accurate for the city.”
Palmer said the data also unveiled that out of the 107 miles of roadway in Russellville city limits, only 1.5 percent of roads fell into the category that would be most expensive to fix.
The cost to repair every street inside city limits, Palmer said, would be $3.5 million – or $7.1 million to repair each street and then go over it with a micropave to make the repair last longer.
Palmer’s presentation also included the cost to repaint all streets that are currently striped – a cost of $82,000.
There was also a section dedicated to all of the street signs in Russellville city limits, including a picture of the sign, a condition rating and the cost to replace or repair the sign. Palmer said it would cost $63,000 to repair all street signs in Russellville city limits currently in disrepair.
“So basically, you look at it as, for less than $150,000, we can fix all signs and re-stripe all these roads,” Palmer said. “This is something otherwise we wouldn’t have known, but now we have a way to look at all of the data.”
