Blair: Hey guys, this is Blair with your IPMA tip of the week. It’s great to see the economy coming back to life and all these roads that we’ve shut down, pipe farms, and the 2007-2008 era, they’re about to be redone, but there’s one thing that’s very important that I want to cover today. Stick around, we’ll be right back.

Announcer: Time for the IPMA tip of the week – brought to you by IPMA Academy, the most comprehensive online certification program for pavement managers on this planet. Here’s your host, author of the Amazon #1 Best Seller – The Book on Better Roads, Blair Barnhardt. Listen in with Blair and his guests as they show you how to do more with more money and less carbon footprint. Let’s get started!

Blair: Okay, so, it’s amazing now. We see the robust economy happening and here I am out in the middle of the rain today doing some pavement managing in any city of America and on one side of the fence, we’ve got this great economy kicking and houses being built on spec again. I’m really happy to see that, don’t get me wrong. But the bottom line is that there are still remnants of the 2007-2008 bust with 100% financing , all that stuff. So we’ve got all of these 21-22 foot roads at the back end of these subdivisions that have not been topped yet. One thing I want to point out is that it’s so so important when you do get out here to do the topping on these roads, make sure that they’re clean. I just took a core here in this subdivision, I went to pull the core out and of course you can see this is the binder, the top of the binder, and look at that Georgia red clay here. The road was never clean properly to begin with, and of course when the topping mix goes on and we compact the top layer, it’s pretty hard to get tact to stick. We’re all taught that in school. Please make sure that not only do you go out and clear the dirt and sweep it with a good L-Gen sweeper and get it all good and clean, but cut back right away all that nasty weeds and whatnot. Make sure you spray those sides of the curb and gutter, asphalt binder surfaces, with some Round Up.

Now, what I’ve done in this particular pavement management project here for the city of anywhere in America, is I’ve made a note here and I’ll read the note to you. Excuse my writing today, as I’m trying to keep everything dry and write while it’s wet. But I made a note here that I”m on a section, so I decided the section to 1426 feet long, predominantly it’s still binder and it’s about to be topped. Probably when the builder builds another 10-12 houses here, he’ll come up with the money to top this out. Make sure the road is good and clean and I said make sure road is sprayed with Round Up as well, and clean before topping. A lot of these roads are going to be too far gone. Make sure the builder doesn’t leave you a stinker. This is a good 3, 2.5in binder mix here. It’s going to be a pretty good base. I don’t see any truck traffic going through here. It’s just a dead end, cul de sac to cul de sac and a short cul de sac in behind me here. The point I’m trying to make is if it is too far gone, get in there and take advice from my buddy Tim at County Versailles in Georgia, what he taught me very early when I moved on to USA is before he gave the bond money back to the builder, if that road was tore up from the logging trucks, he made them do FDR a full depth reclamation with foamed asphalt cement, then top it. And once the road was up to his specification, the 6 inches of foamed asphalt base and inch and a half of top, then he gave them the bond money back and accepted the road on behalf of the county. So think about that. You’ve got hot in place, you’ve got cold in place. If it’s a small subdivision, you might as well just redo it with a small pulverizer and be done with it. You can’t get hot in place and cold in place trains to come in and do anything less than 20 or 30 or 40,000 square yards.

Think about those treatments on your binder asphalt as you bring Elvis back from the dead and recoup these valuable assets, these subdivisions that are built out of pipe farms that we saw from 2008 finally getting a chance to have life breathed into them. I’m sure people that had the houses from way back are real happy to have the new houses. It’s kind of strange when you see the new houses going in 10 years after the old houses, even the architectural style has changed. This is Blair with your IPMA tip of the week, 404-316-9792 if you need help with your pavement manager, give me a call. See you next time, thanks!

And I do want to point out one of our corporate sponsors here, this episode is sponsored by IPMA Academy – the world’s most comprehensive online learning platform for all things in place asphalt recycling, pavement preservation, and pavement management if you’ve ever had the burning desire to learn how to do more with less while saving your valuable infrastructure. This works out to be like a 941% return on investment. A couple cents a square yard to do pavement management, you save $10 a square yard by paying for the right treatment of the right road at the right time for the right reason with the right contractor. So thanks again to our corporate sponsor, IPMA Academy. More on that at http://www.ipmaacademy.com.

Announcer: Hey everyone, like what you just saw? Then you’ll love IPMA Academy! The most comprehensive online certification for pavement managers on this planet. Learn how to save your roads, and do more with less money and less carbon footprint. Head over to www.ipmaacademy.com for 3 free training videos. Thanks for watching!

Shelley Hansel: Hi I’m Shelley Hansel, the mayor of Wellington, Kansas. And we just had our first session with Blair Barnhardt of our pavement study. I have to say, it is probably the best money we have ever spent, as far as I’m concerned, in the city of Wellington. We now have a progressive roadmap, so to speak, of what we can do to improve the streets of our community. Without the Barnhardt group, we would just be fixing things willy nilly. But now we know what’s priority and what isn’t, and how to move forward and save our city money. I’m going to tell you right now, the Barnhardt group is the best decision you’ll ever make. It’s a progressive way for your city to move forward and have better streets, and happier citizens.

John Heese: Hi Folks, John Heese for Apple County. I usually do blooper rolls for Blair, I was hoping to make an exception this time. We brought the Barnhardt Group in last year, had them evaluate 25% of our overall network, had that done, put in street saver software. We’ve been doing pavement management for a long time, many years. We had a retirement and we thought this is a good time to look at our practices, take a close look at what we’ve been doing and see if we want to make changes. So we ended up doing 25% of the network, put it in the street saver software, we liked what we saw so we went ahead and did the other 75% this year. Blair is just wrapping up now today. With us we have the entire network, about 357 wide miles of our network in the street saver software. If you ever get a chance to work with the Barnhardt group, maybe on the last day you can talk Blair into sitting down with you like he did with us and going through all the reports. Real time, he’ll be there with you if your schedules work out, and you can have that back and fourth with him about what you’ve been doing and your decision tree and how all the various reports come out, how to get you to the PCI you want, and how much money it will take, all those good thigns. That’s a great opportunity if you get that chance. So we did that. Blair’s printing out his final report and we’ll be picking through that over the next several weeks and days. But yet, thumbs up if you get a chance to work with the Barnhardt group, I’d recommend it. Even if you can’t work with the Barnhardt group, I did read the book. If you get a chance to pick up the book it’s free if you just email blair@ipma.co, he’ll send you a free copy of the book. Definitely worth reading, it’ll give you some ideas you haven’t thought of. So that’s it for me!