Workers with Ankeny-based Des Moines Asphalt and Paving were recently forced to pause their resurfacing of the city parking lot in the 1400 block of Second Street when the asphalt was discovered to be only two inches thick.
“When they milled through, the machine basically fell through that last bit of crust,” Perry City Administrator Sven Peterson told the Perry City Council at its last meeting. “So they will have to take out part of that because it’s just the very loose sand, and then we’ll have to do a little thicker overlay of asphalt.”
The extra asphalt on the downtown parking lot will mean a higher cost for the city, but the loss will be offset by a gain in the repaving of the Perry Public Safety Building parking lot, completed in mid-June at 908 Willis Ave.
“We actually saved a decent bit of money at the police department lot,” Peterson told the council. “We did not have to do any of the full-depth patching that we thought we would. The structure and the concrete underneath that asphalt cap was actually in really good condition. It was just that top layer of asphalt peeling up over the years over that concrete, so we were able to save quite a bit in patching on that, and we’re able to move that money somewhere else.”
Perry Police Department Chief Eric Vaughn said the freshly resurfaced lot was a big improvement over the potholes and chunks of crumbling asphalt that have made for a rough ride in recent years.
“We have a lot of things going on right now,” Vaughn said, “but this is an exciting improvement.”
The curbed medians were removed in both the Second Street lot and the Willis Avenue lot, which will facilitate snow removal, Peterson said.
