In the northern half of the United States, contractors know the end of season crunch all too well. It’s a delicate balance between making sure customers are happy and having enough weather left to do the work. When big projects pop up towards the end of the season, like repaving a large resort housing community, it takes the dedication of everyone on the crew to get the job done.
ACI Asphalt & Concrete, Inc., Maple Grove, MN, was contacted to complete such a project towards the end of the season last year. The crew removed and replaced 293,867 square feet of asphalt and installed over 200 driveways in just under four weeks, winning them Pavement Magazine’s 2022 Paving: Non-Parking Lot award.
Proper Planning
Every successful project starts with a plan. When ACI was contacted by Centerspace Homes to repave the roads and driveways inside the Grandeville Cascade Lake community in Rochester, MN, they knew they would need a great plan to get the work done efficiently.
“ACI Asphalt & Concrete, Inc. was approached by Centerspace Homes to quote out driveways, parking pads and private roads at Grandeville at Cascade Lake community,” Mike Picott, sales consultant at ACI, says. “In meeting with the client, they explained that they wanted to replace the 17-year-old pavement around the community and address drainage issues due to the failure of multiple catch basins. They wanted to give the place a facelift but at the same time structurally take care of any issues like some heaving that was seen around garages where the previous base material may not have been properly compacted.”
ACI started with the catch basin work, so they knew water would flow where it was supposed to. They repaired 26 catch basins and curbing to the appropriate drainage level around the community.
Then they got to work removing and replacing all the asphalt (driveways, parking areas and private roadways). ACI was committed to completing the work with minimum disruption to the community and the residents who live there.
“We wanted to try and coordinate the work so that when we were excavating driveways and parking bays, there would still be access for everybody,” Picott says. “Before the project began, we sat down with the site managers to get an overview of the whole site. This helped us determine how to best complete this work to make it as unobtrusive as we possibly could, despite the inconvenience it may cause.”
ACI’s VP of Operations, Jeff Hollenback, designed a plan that was efficient and worked for everyone.
And to do this, ACI worked in well-coordinated phases. Starting on September 20th, crews would perform excavation work to the old pavement Mondays through Thursdays. They removed all the driveways, all the parking pads and the additional overflow parking asphalt pavements down to the base. ACI team members added, graded and compacted the base material to prep for the paving crew.
Once the excavation crew worked on an area, the paving crew would come in the next day and follow them; excavation crews would be onsite Monday - Thursday and the paving crew Tuesday - Friday throughout the project..
“We would remove an area and then the following day pave that area, so we could keep progress moving forward,” Picott says. “Doing it this way also gave the areas a little bit of a chance to set up before we paved it and kept all the roads usable for the community. Luckily, there were two entrance roads coming in, so we were always able to get people in and out.”
The community was also looking to remove and replace the existing pavement on the private roads throughout the complex. Crews removed 2-in. of asphalt from these roadways.
Flawless Execution
As crews worked, communication was always well-coordinated to keep the project moving, despite the heavy traffic in the community. ACI worked directly with the main person in the field from Centerspace Homes, Doug Kerr, to ensure their plan was being executed efficiently.
“Doug passed along the information to the management team to keep everything moving and they also put out regular notices to the homeowners,” Picott says. “Our crews were hustling, and I would be working with residents to get them to move their vehicles if necessary. When we were working onsite the one challenge, we had was communicating with many of the homeowners. They either didn’t speak English or English wasn’t their native language, so we used a phone app to communicate with them.”
In all, ACI installed 217 parking areas around the community. They recycled all the asphalt they removed and installed over 4,000 tons of new asphalt, improving the look and usability of the pavement for years to come. By generating an efficient and practical phasing plan for ACI and the customer from the beginning, ACI was able to keep the project and crews moving to get the project done in a timely manner.
“The thing about this project was the sheer volume of it,” Picott says. “We formulated a plan from the very beginning and operations took that plan and modified it, then executed it flawlessly. Our crews were great, and the project turned out phenomenal thanks to the efforts of our team.”
