Pleasanton officials observe machine that could help city afford street renovations
- Roger Sims, Journal Staff
- Oct 8
- 5 min read
By Roger Sims
PLEASANTON – The machine dubbed the “Asphalt Zipper” was fairly loud but it smoothly ground up a swath of broken and disintegrated asphalt on Eighth Street between Sycamore and Cedar streets on Wednesday morning, Oct. 1.
The machine, clamped to the bucket of a large loader, left in its wake a flat, smooth windrow of ground-up asphalt and dirt. After the machine passed down the street, many of the 18 people present – including Pleasanton city officials, city employees and observers – stooped down to grasp a handful of the machine’s product that looked much like the dirt after a rear-tined tiller had chopped it up. Except in this case it was filled with loose gravel.
Pleasanton City Council members and members of the city’s public works department are looking at the machine as the savior of dozens of blocks of city streets that have crumbled into ruin. Members of the public works department said the section of Eighth Street used for the machine test was 15 feet wide, however the 4-foot-wide grinder had already taken two passes leaving only a strip about 2- or 3-foot wide. The edge of the pavement was buried in grass and weeds.
The city council has been looking to find a solution to what has essentially become a town of deteriorating streets, and Councilman Bill Skipper and newly appointed road crew foreman Taylor Bruce (neé Robinson) believe that the Zipper might be the answer to doing more streets quickly with fewer workers and less the expense of hiring an asphalt contractor.
If a contractor was hired to repair the base of the streets and lay asphalt on top, much of the asphalt already there would need to be removed. Dave Stiller, the company’s Kansas manager, said that using the Zipper the existing road bed, whether it is asphalt or gravel, is ground down so that it can be shaped and crowned with a grader and compacted with a roller.
Stiller said he has many customers that are townships, towns and even remote counties that have one- and two-person public works departments that use the machine to create hard-surface roads.
Dave Fokken, national government sales manager for the company, said the core idea is simple: “Most municipalities struggle with keeping their streets in good condition with limited budgets. The Asphalt Zipper allows them do their own road prep work by recycling worn-out asphalt into reusable base material call RAP (Recycled Asphalt Product).
“They can then reshape, compact, and prepare it for a contractor overlay—creating durable, longer lasting street repairs at a fraction of the traditional cost – allowing municipalities to get more streets fixed each year with their current budgets.”
He cited an example where a city reworked streets at a cost of $4,000 per block instead of the $60,000 cost of hiring a contractor. In another instance, a township completed a project for $40,000 vs. the $200,000 bid from a contractor, he said.
The Pleasanton council recently voted to allow the purchase of a used grader at the recommendation of Bruce. While the actual work on the streets may be delayed until weather warms next spring, she said that the city’s public works employees could begin working on reshaping ditches along roadways during the colder weather.
Skipper said that, after the Zipper crushes the base and is compacted, the city is looking at using a liquid treatment over the shaped bed that will provide stability.
Bruce appeared before the Linn County Commission on Monday, Sept. 29, to request their help in using county crews and equipment to apply a layer of chip-seal over the base. She had been in contact with county Public Works Administrator Jesse Walton about help from the county. He estimated the cost of chip-seal treatment would be about $26,500 per running mile. This would include material, county employee wages, and fuel.
That would roughly be about $1,500 for a block 100 yards long. Stiller estimated the cost of running the Zipper would be about $250 per block, including the occasional replacement of the grinding teeth (there are 132 teeth on the 4-foot grinder) at $12 per tooth.
County road crews use the chip-seal process to maintain the paved roads that are outside city limits. Repairs are made to uneven pavement or potholes followed by a layer of hot asphalt, which is then followed by a layer of fine gravel that is compressed with a roller. While there is initially some residual loose gravel, the road surface eventually becomes smooth.
While using the Zipper to treat the roadbed is much more economical than grinding the surface and hauling off that asphalt, the cost of the machine, roughly $400,000, is one consideration.
The city, which now has about $600,000 from both a 1% sales tax and a grant from the Kansas Department of Transportation to replace a couple of streets, including the street in front of the city’s schools, collects a little over $300,000 a year in sales tax money. That sales tax, which was approved by city voters two years ago, can only be used for street maintenance and repair or to purchase equipment necessary to maintain streets.
But Fokken said there is another option for cities that may not have that kind of money to spend immediately.
“Most cities use an annual payment option for their purchase,” he said. “This allows them to break the cost into five or six annual payments, with the first payment not due until a full year after delivery. This way, the savings created by using an Asphalt Zipper is used to cover their annual payment. They don't need a penny from a capital equipment budget.”
The Zipper can prepare many more streets than the city can afford all at once. Four passes down the block of Eighth Street would have taken about half an hour if obstacles were out of the way. In this case, some mailboxes would have needed to be set back because they had been installed in the grassy area that would have been part of the street.
Skipper estimates the city could afford to do about 15 blocks a year considering the city’s budget.
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