News

Fremont residents question repairs
by Chris De Benedetti, STAFF WRITER
Fremont Argus, August 19, 2006

FREMONT — Officials say the city of Fremont cannot afford to maintain its streets adequately while it grapples with budget woes. 

If that is true, a growing number of citizens want to know why street maintenance work has been performed recently on a number of the city's intersections.

Mike Haley points to the repairs performed Thursday on tiny Tropic Way, a little-used dead-end street — with no house fronts or driveways on it — in the 28 Palms neighborhood.

"With all the potholes that (officials) say they can't pave, and they go and (repair) a whole strip of nothing?" said Haley, a Fremont resident since 1969. "It's a street to nowhere."

Haley said the street's repairs symbolize why he opposes Measure L.

"I'll vote against it, (because of) the way they're spending money," said Haley, a NUMMI employee who also owns his own vacuum business. "It boggles the mind."

But Fremont City Engineer Norm Hughes said that Tropic Way is one of many Fremont streets receiving a cost-conscious type of repair called cape and slurry seal work. It is all part of a $1,139,000 project the City Council approved in April that is intended to extend the life of the pavement at a much cheaper cost than doing extensive asphalt overlay work.

Hughes said that, this year, about 110 streets are receiving a cape seal — the application of a chip seal followed by a slurry seal within a few days. Meanwhile, 23 roads will be given a slurry seal — a low-cost paving surface that is a mixture of asphalt, oil, water, rock and other additives.

Fremont maintenance crews also are performing both cape and slurry seal treatments to a small number of other streets, Hughes said.

"If we don't, we'll have entire streets failing and we'll need total reconstruction," he added.

Based on current data, Hughes said, doing asphalt overlay work is much more expensive — about $55 per square yard. By comparison, slurry seal is $1.75 per square yard, and cape seal is $2.85.

But is the seal work really necessary for something such as little-used Tropic Way?

"Even streets with low traffic need this treatment to keep them from failing," Hughes replied. "(By doing this), we won't need to overlay all of our residential streets at once."

Staff writer Chris De Benedetti covers Fremont issues. He can be reached at (510) 353-7002 or cdebenedetti@angnewspapers.com.