City officials are considering a different approach to paving Brookhaven’s streets that could mean significant savings.

Engineer Ryan Holmes of Dungan Engineering presented more information on street assessments at a Board of Aldermen meeting Tuesday. During a previous meeting, Alderman Ward 6 David Phillips proposed to accelerate the city’s paving allowance for the next two years to get much-needed paving done. The proposed amount is $2.25 million.

The board resolved to look further into the process of evaluating the city’s streets as Holmes suggested. These streets have been assessed and graded according to priority of need. Holmes said by evaluating the findings of the street assessments and coordinating materials specific to the street’s issue, rather than using one material for the entire city,  money can be saved.

Holmes presented an example of the comprehensive report the city would need to thoroughly evaluate the best course of action for the streets and the budget. While initial grades and assessments have been made, Holmes said, the report needs to be completed by riding the roads.

“This is a very incomplete spreadsheet right now — I had to make a lot of assumptions, but it does show you there are some ways that you could optimize your money more,” Holmes said. “But there’s no guarantee, some roads you’re just going to have to go and see.”

Holmes explained two approaches to paving, preservation and worst-first. He used industry numbers for paving material and assumptions about the average size of roads to illustrate the difference between the two.

“If all of the roads in Brookhaven are great ­— no potholes, they’re all smooth —you’re still going to need to spend $900,000 a year to keep them that way or you’re going to get behind,” Holmes said. “You’ll get in a hole that you just can’t dig out of, without spending a bunch of money at one time.

“If they all fall apart and we just let them be, say we’d have to reconstruct them all, you’d need to budget $2.7 million a year to keep them up,” he said. “As one gets bad, another gets bad and the conditions will get worse.”

The city currently has $750,000 budgeted on street paving.

Holmes said the reality is somewhere in the middle.  The city will need to reconstruct or do more work on some, and could save money by doing preventative maintenance on roads in good shape.

“Neither one of those [numbers, approaches] are practical, but I use that to say where we want to be is somewhere in the middle,” Holmes said. “The true reality is we’re going to have a mesh of reconstructing some roads. But hopefully trying to repair some roads before they get too bad.”

Holmes described several alternative materials and approaches to laying hot-mix asphalt, as has been the general practice in the past. The different materials could be used to fine-tune the maintenance approach. Holmes said that using cheaper – yet often times more durable – materials to maintain the quality of a road is less expensive than more extensive construction projects when the road has gotten into bad shape.

“If you have a road that is in pretty decent shape and you add five or eight years to it, you’ve saved yourself a bunch of money. If you wait five years to do it, what you’ve done is doubled the cost of fixing it,” Holmes said, referencing a certain material. “That’s why I’m pushing these items, you can add more years of life but it’s a third of the cost.”

Engineers and board members alike noted during the meeting that Brookhaven is ahead of the curve by considering a preventative approach to paving. Paving needs that exceed paving budgets is universal across all counties, cities and towns.

The board will take time to evaluate before making a decision on the budget or hiring Dungan Engineering to complete the report and will address the options at a later date.