City of Bend plans $4.34 million in paving, other street preservation work this year
BEND, Ore. (KTVZ) -- Bend city councilors have approved this year's street preservation projects that involve several streets slated for paving, chipseal and slurry seal contracts.
The city is preparing to do about $4.34 million worth of street preservation contract work this year that will improve about 77 lane miles around the city. That includes about 12.9 miles of paving, 26.7 miles of chipseal, 26 miles of slurry treatments, and 11.1 miles of micro paving.
This work is supported by Bend's Transportation Fee.
The city says its "goal is to maintain and preserve streets with the most cost-effective treatment for the road condition, implementing the right treatment at the right time."
Maintenance treatments for the 2026 construction season include:
Paving: Old asphalt is ground out and replaced, or a new layer of asphalt is paved on top of existing roadway. This process can take a couple of days.
Chip seals: Asphalt emulsion and rock are applied to the road. Rolling, short-term closures.
Slurry seal: A treatment typically for low-volume residential streets. One-day closures.
Micro paving: A cost-effective, quick treatment for high-volume streets. Night work.
With its own crews, separate from the contracted services, the city will also reconstruct the asphalt surface of about 1.5 miles of streets this year. With reconstruction, the existing roadway asphalt surface is removed and rebuilt. That work can take several days.
The city of Bend monitors the condition of roads to determine maintenance plans. That allows for the right treatment to be applied at the right time to save costs and extend the life of a road.
The worst roads need full reconstruction, which is exponentially more expensive than regular maintenance. The city says full roadway reconstruction is not an efficient use of maintenance funds and is likely to be paid for as part of a larger transportation construction project.
“The street preservation contracts are part of our continued maintenance efforts to extend the life of our transportation infrastructure with the most cost-effective treatments and available resources,” said Transportation and Mobility Department Director David Abbas.
“We have more than 900 lane miles of roads to maintain, and the cost of maintaining streets has increased considerably in recent years. Our operations and maintenance revenues, such as the Transportation Fee, will need to keep pace with cost and inflation increases in the future to improve our pavement conditions.”
To learn more about Bend’s street preservation practices, visit bendoregon.gov/streetpreservation.
To subscribe to weekly emails to plan your best route around road work and construction, visit bendoregon.gov/traffic for the weekly road and traffic report.
