Published: July 10, 2009 11:41 pm      

Street work getting finished early this year

Law enforcement usually gets the coolest equipment. From ladder trucks to armored SWAT vans, things with lights and sirens somehow capture the public’s attention.

But consider the humble milling machine, owned and operated courtesy of Kokomo taxpayers.

Not only can the machine mill a 7-foot wide swath of pavement 13 inches deep, it has also managed to pay for itself.

Not as sexy, perhaps, as the ability to repel rifle slugs, but Kokomo Street Superintendent Joe Ewing couldn’t be more pleased with his highly effective “planer.”

It can fill up a dump truck in under a minute when it’s out tearing up alleyways, grinding up and spitting out an inch of asphalt with ease.

And the Witgern 2000 is versatile as well, able to chew up sod, packed earth, and even concrete if need be. It’s perfect for what street foreman Lynn Rudolph likes to call “custom jobs.”

It milled off the tennis courts at Studebaker Park, so the city could install a new skate park.

And Friday, Foster Park-goers watched as it tore through the ag-lime surface of the old softball diamond, making a graded, dirt pad for new sod.

“If we didn’t have that thing, we’d have had to get a grader out here and scrape up all of this stuff, pile it up, and use front-loaders to put it into dump trucks,” Rudolph said.

The planer can also be programmed to create an exact grade, Stranahan noted, which meant he could engineer the ground to slope at a slight, 1 percent grade from the front of the new Kokomo Arts Pavilion down to the edge of the old ball diamond.

Why more cities don’t have a similar machine, Ewing said, remains a mystery.

“It’s paid for itself already, not just in terms of dollars and cents, but also because Kokomo cannot be held hostage on deals for the remediation of our infrastructure,” Rudolph said.

For example, the city can go ahead and mill anytime. Because that work is completed ahead of time, the contractors can come in and lay asphalt quickly.

This year, when the city awarded a street paving contract to E&B Paving, Anderson, it was done with the stipulation that the city would grind all of the streets being resurfaced.

All E&B had to do, thanks to the milling machine, was lay new asphalt.

As a result, E&B is finished resurfacing 87,000 square yards (about 3.8 linear miles) of pavement.

The machine itself cost about $450,000, to be paid over a five-year lease/purchase, and Ewing had to lobby for years to get it. The Kokomo Common Council, at former Mayor Matt McKillip’s recommendation, purchased the machine in 2005.

According to Ewing, a past president of the Indiana street superintendent’s association, Kokomo is the only city in Indiana with so much milling capacity.

That means, Ewing said, that Kokomo’s streets aren’t filled with potholes, because the city gets more done, at less cost, with the milling machine.

Contractors add an additional $5,000 a day to cover the cost of renting a milling machine, he said. Kokomo simply goes ahead and mills the streets with its own crews.

City engineer Carey Stranahan said the year before the city bought “the planer,” it spent $186,000 just getting the streets milled for resurfacing.

Even including upkeep, Stranahan figures the machine has already paid for itself. Ewing thinks the machine could last for another decade with good maintenance.

In all this year, 32 stretches of city streets are being resurfaced, and all 32 were milled by the city.

In addition to the milling, the city also has a paving machine. Ewing said the city is on pace this year to set an all-time record for the amount of street surface put down by city crews.

That’s notable partially because the price of asphalt has not dropped appreciably from last year. Of the $660,000 spent on the E&B contract, about $550,000 is the cost of the materials used, Stranahan said.

Friday, Stranahan couldn’t help but brag a little bit about Kokomo’s streets, as compared to another city within an hour’s drive. One key indicator, he noted, is that Kokomo’s streets have well-defined curbs.

Some cities, it seems, “save money” by skipping the milling process, and simply adding layer upon layer of asphalt until the road surface is level with the curb.

That’s not how they do it in the City of Firsts.

• Scott Smith is a Kokomo Tribune staff writer. He may be reached at (765) 454-8569 or via e-mail at scott.smith@ kokomotribune.com