PavingSouthwest OhioCincinnati

Great Oaks District Wide Asphalt Maintenance Services

Great Oaks Career Campuses came into the 2025 season with pavement in three different conditions across three campuses. At Laurel Oaks in Wilmington the lots were structurally sound and needed sealing before their cracks opened up. At Live Oaks in Milford and Scarlet Oaks in Sharonville the picture was mixed — a worn surface over a base still worth keeping in some areas, and in others pavement that had stopped being pavement at all, a service drive worn down to gravel and dirt.

The district-wide contract buys something different in each place. Laurel Oaks gets vegetation cut back, hot-pour crack filling, two coats of fortified sealer with the first squeegeed and the second sprayed, and restriping — scheduled across multiple mobilizations so the campus never loses all of its parking at once. Live Oaks gets that same preventive treatment on its sound lots, a two-inch mill and overlay where the surface is worn, and full-depth removal and replacement where it is gone; the district also exercised an authorized alternate for additional full-depth pavement extending the rear service drive. Scarlet Oaks gets a two-inch mill and overlay, five speed humps on Great Oaks Drive ground into the existing pavement so the new asphalt keys in and striped safety yellow, and four concrete catch basin collars, with a fifth at Live Oaks.

What the district ends up with is one season of work priced item by item on a pre-bid TOP-C unit price contract, with the expensive treatments confined to the areas that actually needed them.

Technical Discussion

Three campuses, three different treatments

The simplest way to run a district paving program is to pick one treatment and apply it everywhere: sealcoat the whole district this year, mill and overlay it in six. That is easy to budget and wrong in both directions at once. It spends surface money on lots that only needed sealing, and it puts sealer over areas whose base is already gone.

The rule that sorts them is written into this contract's crack-filling line item. The ASTM D-5329 hot-pour filler, fortified with silica sand and latex, goes into non-alligatored cracks larger than an eighth of an inch. That qualifier is doing real work. A single crack wider than an eighth of an inch is a surface that has moved and can be sealed shut. An alligatored area is the base underneath announcing it has failed, and filler put into it will be milled off later.

So one contract carries three sections. Laurel Oaks takes no structural work at all — crack fill, two coats of sealer and paint, adding no thickness because it does not need any. Where the base holds and the surface is worn, at Live Oaks and Scarlet Oaks, two inches come off and two go back on: half an inch of ODOT #448 leveling course under an inch and a half of #448 surface, joints hot-tar sealed, restriped. Where the pavement is gone, the section is built new — six inches of ODOT #304 aggregate, three compacted inches of #301 base course asphalt, a trackless coat, and an inch and a half of #448 surface.

That is the ratio to carry to a treasurer. Ten and a half inches of new material in one place, two in the next, none in the third, in a single season. The difference is not a matter of degree, and the only thing deciding which treatment an area gets is what the base is doing under it. Walking all three campuses to sort that out before pricing is what keeps the good pavement from paying for the bad.

Our Work