Just one wrong weather occurrence could spur a domino effect in delays and rescheduling across citywide street preservation projects.
The primary goal of street preservation is to extend the life of the roadway, ensure proper function, and limit the necessity for extensive repairs. Battle Ground Public Works Director Mark Herceg explained it essentially keeps good roads good and prevents them from turning into bad roads.
“From a cost perspective, that’s the right way to do it because the price difference is just gigantic,” Herceg said. “So fixing a road, you know, you have the same budget fixing a road, you may be able to do 1,000 feet, where if you’re doing preservation, you can do like three miles of road.”
Herceg said the proactive preservation approach is a night-and-day difference for a city’s budget. City Communications Manager Alisha Smith said that in 2024, the Battle Ground City Council budgeted $2.5 million in funding for preservation work. Preservation work includes mill and fill, cape, chip, slurry and crack sealing, micro-surfacing, pavement markings and lane striping and ADA ramp improvements.
“This work is very seasonal,” Herceg said.
The material in a slurry seal includes water, which requires sunlight and heat to work properly.
“So having the sun, both from a temperature perspective and just the sun perspective, actually gets that water to evaporate, and that’s how the slurry seal hardens,” Herceg added. “We have some weather in October that usually works, but when you get much past that, you just can’t do the process. You’re either going to have rain or just not enough sun to make it work.”
Oftentimes, delays to the road preservation projects are completely outside of the scope of the city’s control, yet residents on social media have tended to call out the city of Battle Ground and tax dollars.
In 2024, contractors were unable to complete a road preservation project along Northwest Fourth Street near Fred Meyer. The state of the project left many residents displeased with the city, rather than the contractor, as conditions prevented the work from being finished.
“That road was to get a cape seal,” Herceg said. “So again, chip seal on the bottom, slurry seal on the tip. And so they got the chip seal portion done but ran out of time. … Over the winter some of the chip seal came up and so they had to come back and repair it and then they’re prepping to do the slurry seal portion to finish that out.”
Between 2024 and 2025, street preservation projects included a chip seal on Southeast Commerce Avenue and other road preservation methods in nearly every quadrant of the city on neighborhood streets.
One item that sets back the budget with each project is that specific preservation methods are federally mandated to include ADA ramp improvements at intersections, which each ADA ramp totals roughly $10,000, Herceg said. Just one project in 2024 included over 20 ADA ramp improvements.
“If you have a set aside of say a million dollars a year and you have to do 30 ramps, that’s going to eat into that,” Herceg said. “And so it’s less actual road work stuff we can do, but it does benefit, obviously, the traveling public. So it’s a good thing …”
The upcoming Battle Ground University public works portion on Sept. 30 will highlight and spark discussion on road projects, among other things. The Battle Ground University series is pre-application only, but Smith recommended that residents consider signing up for next year or watching the associated presentations.
“The thing that we try and sell is you will get to know the people who you can ask those questions as they come up,” Smith said of when community members have questions regarding city government. “So it helps clarify who I even ask my question to.”
For more information and to find the PowerPoint presentations, visit cityofbg.org/983/Battle-Ground-University.
“I will say the one thing that you do miss, just reviewing a PowerPoint presentation versus attending in person is the discussion because we really kind of have these sessions be open forum,” Smith said.
The City of Battle Ground offers information on each road preservation project as well as explanations to each preservation method at cityofbg.org/443/Street-Preservation-Program.
