How Your City Can Ensure It Can Afford Its Infrastructure
Lake Street runs through downtown Chisholm, MN, and is up for renovation soon.
Understanding the real costs and long-term liabilities of our infrastructure is essential for the long-term prosperity of our places. Unfortunately, this detail is often overlooked in our decision-making process. Our cities and towns get stuck repeating a growth and development pattern we can no longer afford.
If we want to do something about it, we have to shift the conversation by asking different questions.
Chisholm is a small, 5,000-person community in Central Minnesota with active citizens invested in making it a stronger place. It began as a timber town, but when the founders realized they were sitting on top of some of the best mineral deposits in the world, it became a mining town.
This community, like many others, grew incrementally over time through a series of many small bets. The traditional development pattern is most obvious on Lake Street, Chisholm’s commercial core. This is the most intact main street and commercial downtown of any of the cities along the Iron Range, if not central Minnesota. The street is lined with two-story, mixed-use buildings built in 1904 — structures that have accumulated wealth for the city year after year, even with the booms and bust cycles commonly experienced by resource-based communities.
Even with Chisholm's population decline, the city's traditional development pattern has continued to be resilient to these stresses.
Thanks to three of the world-class attractions within the boundaries of this community — The Minnesota Discovery Center, Mining Museum, and the Redhead Mountain Bike Park — Chisholm is becoming a tourist destination as others discover this gem of a place.
This renewed enthusiasm has residents thinking differently about their community. Over the past year, Chisholm has been shifting the conversation and thinking differently about growth, development, and public investment using what they learned by participating in a Community Action Lab.
Chisholm has been successful because citizens aren’t willing to accept the status quo anymore. They know things need to change, and they’re willing to have the tough conversations to make those changes happen.
As the state is preparing to do maintenance on Lake Street, which will obligate the city and state to another 25 to 30 years of both short-term and long-term fiscal liabilities, Chisholm is asking: How can we make sure we can afford to maintain what we already have?
Humble Observation
Observing how people use the street is actually the highest form of public engagement. Chisholm doesn’t have to hire external engineers, conduct extensive studies, or host multiple community workshops to learn they’ve got too much pavement on Lake Street. Every snowfall provides an opportunity to observe and record where people drive.
Urbanists have coined the term “sneckdowns,” which is a temporary curb extension or lane narrowing caused by snowfall. Following freshly fallen snow, urbanists take to the streets and use the snow to document where vehicles are actually driving in the streets. The critics of this observation point out that this is a temporary condition that is the result of a one-time condition. They explain that everyone drives more cautiously when it is snowing, so this is not a natural phenomenon for daily driving when the weather is warm and sunny.
Chisholm uses sand and tiny gravel to add traction to snow-pack on their streets throughout the winter. This material accumulates and remains on the street until the spring when either the rain or the street sweeper clears this remaining remembrance of winter away. The gravel begins to collect on undisturbed parts of the street. Unlike snow, the gravel is visible for many weeks after the last snowfall and the first spring cleanup. It is present in hazardous snowy conditions and on sunny, clear spring days as a witness to regular driver behaviors.
The orange areas highlight the excess payment covered in gravel.
The result is several wide stripes of gravel marking excessive pavement that is not used or needed by everyday vehicle travel. These areas can be seen on either side of the center yellow line and prominently in a lane between the travel lane and the parallel parking. The gravel highlights the extra asphalt that is not used by vehicles. This is extra pavement dedicated solely to the car.
This excess pavement could be converted to productive use.
This additional asphalt adds to the street's long-term maintenance obligations for both the city of Chisholm and the state of Minnesota. Additional impervious roadway surfaces also exponentially increase the cost of managing stormwater runoff because of the need for larger pipes and treatment areas.
In addition, there’s the long-term liability of resurfacing or replacing the street.
Doing the Math
According to this Minnesota Department of Transportation report on the lifecycle cost considerations for roadways, the estimated cost to build a road is over $650,000 a lane mile. The estimated cost to mill and repave the surface of the street is $175,000 a lane mile. What do these costs look like for a street like Lake Street with the equivalent of an entire lane of extra asphalt?
Lake Street is approximately 0.4 miles long. If we multiply the estimated construction costs by this length, we can estimate that this extra asphalt would cost the city and state $260,000.
This initial investment on the extra pavement then has additional on-going maintenance costs. Currently, a portion of Lake Street is proposed for re-paving. If we multiply this same length by the cost to mill and overlay, we can estimate that it would cost the city and state $70,000 to repave this extra area of asphalt. That’s a lot of money for a portion of the street that no one needs. This cost is in addition to the cost of repaving the travel lanes and parallel parking spots that the city does need.
A city like Chisholm may only face the need to repave every 25 to 30 years. The city may defer this maintenance to the state, which will shift or redistribute state and federal tax dollars from somewhere else to Chisholm. The residents of Chisholm may not have to fund this work out of their general fund, so there may not be a local outcry to reduce the pavement on Lake Street.
What if the Chisholm needs to repair a damaged sewer line or upgrade a water lateral to one of the buildings on Lake Street? The city’s utility department would be responsible for restoring the roadway. The costs for this work would be paid for directly by the city without the benefit of using external dollars. These costs would then be added to the utility expenses and passed directly to the city residents through their utility bills.
These costs are additional burdens on the residents of this community; a burden no community of this size can actually afford.
Limiting Liabilities
Lake Street today.
Areas currently covered in gravel.
Chisholm has the opportunity to make a once-in-a-lifetime investment on Lake Street. Narrowing Lake Street can be done by moving the curbs. The area currently occupied by extra asphalt could be used for wider sidewalks, or for green stormwater amenities like bioretention planters and street trees. This extra sidewalk area could accommodate visitor needs by adding bicycle parking.
This option is a better investment for Chisholm because it transforms a liability into a productive opportunity.
Edward Erfurt is the Director of Community Action at Strong Towns. He is a trained architect and passionate urban designer with over 20 years of public- and private-sector experience focused on the management, design, and successful implementation of development and placemaking projects that enrich the tapestry of place. He believes in community-focused processes that are founded on diverse viewpoints, a concern for equity, and guided through time-tested, traditional town-planning principles and development patterns that result in sustainable growth with the community character embraced by the communities which he serves.