PavingSouthwest OhioCincinnati

Great Oaks Asphalt Maintenance 2026

Great Oaks Career Campuses teaches trades on four campuses spread across southwest Ohio — Diamond Oaks in Cincinnati, Laurel Oaks in Wilmington, Live Oaks in Milford, and Scarlet Oaks in Sharonville. The drives and lots at all four carry buses, student drivers, and the trucks and trailers that come with a career-technical program. The district's 2026 asphalt contract treats the four campuses as one program rather than as four separate jobs in four separate years.

Most of the paved area gets a two-inch mill and overlay: leveling course, surface course, joints hot-tar sealed, restriped to the layout each campus already uses. Around that sit the items that decide how long the new surface lasts. At Diamond Oaks the contract replaces roughly a hundred feet of extruded curb, regrades the swales on both sides of a campus roadway deeper than they were, sets a yard drain collection basin, and trenches a six-inch pipe across the road to daylight into that swale. The paver drive in the same area comes out and a six-inch reinforced concrete drive goes in. Scarlet Oaks gets three concrete catch basin collars and, in one area, a four-inch mill with a binder course beneath the new surface. Laurel Oaks gets five speed humps and the striping that goes with them.

The district ends up with its pavement renewed on one plan and one schedule of prices, bought pre-bid on a TOP-C unit price contract, and with the water at Diamond Oaks routed off the roadway instead of across it.

Paving crew staging the material truck and paver beside the campus training tower

Asphalt paver laying new surface course as the crew follows on foot in high-visibility gear

Freshly placed concrete slab over reinforcing mesh during flatwork at Great Oaks

Technical Discussion

Why the drainage work came before the asphalt

Asphalt rarely fails from the top down. It fails where water sits on it or under it — at the low corner of a lot, along a broken curb line, on the shoulder of a drive where the grade delivers runoff onto the pavement instead of past it. A mill and overlay resets the surface and changes nothing about where the water goes. Put two fresh inches over an area that ponds and the new pavement starts coming apart in the same footprint as the old one, on roughly the same schedule.

That is why the Diamond Oaks roadway is sequenced the way it is. The drainage correction is not an extra added after the paving; it is what makes the paving worth doing. About 100 linear feet of six-inch extruded curb comes out and goes back in. The swales on both sides of the roadway are excavated and regraded deeper. A yard drain collection basin is set. The roadway is sawcut and trenched for a six-inch Schedule 80 pipe that carries water under the drive and daylights into the swale. Only then is the surrounding area milled two inches and rebuilt — trackless tack at 0.05 gallons per square yard, half an inch of ODOT #448 leveling course, an inch and a half of #448 surface.

The same reasoning explains the smaller structures. The ring of asphalt around a catch basin is where water enters the pavement and where the surface breaks up first; the three collars at Scarlet Oaks replace that ring in concrete and take the joint out of the asphalt. The pavers at Diamond Oaks give way to six inches of ODOT Class C concrete on a four-inch #304 base, dowelled with #4 rebar into the edges around it.

The argument to bring to a treasurer is short. The drainage items are a small fraction of the square footage in this contract, and they are the only items that cannot be added later without cutting open pavement that was just paid for.

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