Dear Citizens of Fort Scott,
Our city faces a critical turning point regarding our streets. For decades, our community has relied on a repetitive cycle of milling and overlaying roads. This practice places expensive new asphalt over shifting Bourbon County clay and aging brick pavers. The results speak for themselves: roads that crack, shift, and fail long before they should.
With 600 blocks of mostly residential and collector streets to maintain—built when our population was 12,000 but funded now by a population of 7,500—we can no longer afford inefficient habits. We must adopt smarter, fiscally responsible engineering.
The clear solution for Fort Scott is a process called Full-Depth Reclamation (FDR) with a double chip seal surface. This is a Kansas Department of Transportation (KDOT) approved and recommended procedure.
Here is why this strategy is vastly superior to a standard mill and overlay:
4-to-1 Cost Advantage: FDR with double chip seal costs approximately one-fourth the price of traditional asphalt milling and overlaying. For every single block we fix using the old method, we can repair four blocks using FDR for the exact same budget.
4-to-1 Speed Advantage: The time factor is identical to the cost savings. Crews can complete four blocks of FDR in the same timeframe it takes to complete just one block of a traditional mill and overlay. We can repair our entire city network four times faster.
True Structural Stabilization: A mill and overlay simply hides structural problems under a thin layer of asphalt. FDR blends the existing road materials 8 to 10 inches deep. It mechanically stabilizes the base by mixing AB-3 rock, recycled asphalt pavement (RAP), and a small percentage of native clay. This creates a rock-solid, durable foundation.
Preserving and Monetizing History: Many of our streets cover historic brick pavers made from local Bourbon County clay. Instead of destroying or paving over them, the FDR process allows us to carefully salvage these historic pavers. The city can resell them, generating new revenue to reinvest directly into our community.
Unfortunately, the current administration refuses to adapt. They intend to keep doing what we have always done, wasting limited tax dollars on short-term fixes that do not address the root causes of our failing roads.
We need your help to overturn this bad decision.
Please get involved. Attend the next city commission meeting, call your local representatives, and demand that Fort Scott switch to this KDOT-approved engineering strategy. Let’s stretch our tax dollars further, protect our historic assets, and finally build the durable streets our community deserves.
Sincerely,
Pete Allen