PavingSouthwest OhioCincinnati

Warren County Parking Lot Paving

The lot serving the Warren County Old Courthouse and the Old Administration Building in Lebanon is a public lot in the working sense of the word. Jurors, people with hearings, and county staff use it on a weekday schedule that does not pause for a contractor, and the pavement had reached the point where patching was no longer the answer.

The proposal on file is a straightforward resurfacing of that lot. Roughly 250 square yards where the pavement had gone through are removed and pre-patched to a depth of five inches. About 900 square yards are transitionally milled and hauled off site, so the new surface meets the existing grades at the entrances and along the edges rather than standing proud of them. The lot then takes a tack coat throughout, a half-inch leveling course, and an inch and a half of surface course across approximately 5,500 square yards, and is striped back to its original layout. The materials are ODOT-specified throughout — Type 2 intermediate course, 407 tack, Type 1 surface course.

Prodigy supplies the materials, the labor and the equipment for it: milling machine, saw, mechanized sweeper, hot box, paver, ten-ton vibratory roller, striper. The schedule is worked out with county staff so the lot comes back in usable pieces and the courthouse keeps functioning while the work goes on. The proposal is written against a pre-bid TIPS cooperative contract.

Newly paved asphalt drive and curb at the Warren County lot

New asphalt roadway running between mature trees on the Warren County property

Edge of the new Warren County asphalt against fresh concrete curb and gutter

Technical Discussion

When repaving is a maintenance purchase, not a construction project

Most of what a county buys for a building is procured as construction. This agreement says plainly that it is not. It is a contract for materials, equipment and services, it carries no construction management and no engineering services, and it records that the thresholds in ORC 153.502 and ORC 123.281(B) are not met. That classification is not a technicality tucked into the back of the document. It is why the county can buy a resurfacing the way it buys any other maintenance service.

What follows from it is mostly what does not have to happen. There is no design professional to engage and no drawings to review, because the work replaces an existing surface in kind — same footprint, same grades, same striping layout as before. There is no construction manager, because there is one trade and one crew on site. And because the work is a service purchase, it can go through a cooperative contract competitively solicited before the county ever used it, rather than a project-specific bid cycle longer than the work itself.

The classification holds because the scope stays inside it. Pre-patching 250 square yards to five inches, milling 900 to make the transitions work, and laying two inches of new asphalt over 5,500 square yards is maintenance of an existing asset. Change any one of those facts and the answer changes with it. Regrade the lot, add drainage structures, expand it, or move the entrances, and the work stops being a like-for-like replacement and starts being a construction project — with the procurement path, the design fees and the schedule that go with one.

That is the part worth carrying to a treasurer: the vehicle should match the work, and the test for which vehicle applies is whether anything about the asset is changing besides its condition. A resurfacing that stays squarely inside maintenance is bought and scheduled like maintenance. Let one added structure turn it into a construction project and the county pays for that decision twice, once in fees and once in calendar.

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