Like all professional heavy highway contractors, when A. Colarusso and Son, Inc. repaves a city street, they use professional equipment and several experienced workers with years of knowledge and experience. It's what they do. The job on S. 3rd was not a simple patch job, and finishing the job as quickly as possible is expected and critical (avoiding rain, resuming traffic, other streets to get to). First, they tear out the old pavement, going down a few inches, using an enormous piece of machinery known as a milling machine which sends the unwanted asphalt into waiting dump trucks. They then clean and prepare the surface before a huge paving machine spreads the new, hot asphalt and smooths it out. A hot roller or two are used to tidy things up and compact the asphalt. It probably took Colarusso no more than 3 days to complete the entire S. 3rd Street project before they moved on to another street.
Within 2 years, by 2019, it was obvious in a few spots along South 3rd that the repaving job was substandard, with cracks galore and strange, crumbling asphalt, some pieces the size of baseballs. By last winter a short section near Warren in the southbound lane had become a real problematic mess that could no longer be ignored. Watching trucks and cars ride over the mess from the sidewalk, it appeared there was no solid support below the pavement -- the road would actually sink with each passing vehicle. This was not just a big pothole that required filling with patch. It was strange and ugly, to say the least. And widespread.
DPW Superintendent Robert Perry, Jr. never once himself brought up the subject of the obvious-and-long-failing street, but last year, after some questions from the public and an alder about what was so wrong with South 3rd Street and why it failed so quickly, he had this to say at the April 2022 Informal Common Council meeting: "So we came in with a contractor and we milled it. Once we milled it, we observed that most of the concrete subbase had some issues but at this stage of the game we didn't have the material quantities to do a full reconstruction and we hadn't planned on it so we didn't have the time. So we went heavy on the binder and with the topcoat to try to hold it together and obviously it didn't hold. It's getting hammered with the trucks...It looks like when the concrete was poured originally, the term is it was GREEN, and it wasn't properly cured before they started driving on it and it fractured. It turns into basically rubber, but it's not a solid chunk of concrete...So we are going to have to excavate all that out, go below it with a new stone subbase, some fabric put in some binder and the put a topcoat on... We're probably have to go down about two feet... We don't have the budget to get it all done this year, but we are certainly going to attack as much of the really, really bad areas and get that cleaned up."
None of Hudson's street surfaces are made of concrete - it's called asphalt. Our sidewalks are made from concrete; our streets are paved with asphalt.
Mr. Perry's comments about South 3rd at the following month's CC meeting were a bit different: "When we were milling and paving, we ripped off the top 4 inches and then we found some issues with the concrete subbase. But that was not planned to be a road reconstruction project... they [Colarusso] did not address any of the subbase because that wasn't in their contract. They were hired to mill and replace the top coats of asphalt... It [the subbase] was not part of the project... DPW found the problem. Colarusso was there when we identified the issue, but it wasn't part of their project. We told them to put the binder in and we told them to put the base and topcoat on."
The subbase is the main load-bearing portion of any paved surface intended for vehicle traffic-- it is essentially the foundation of a street or highway. No subbase, or a faulty one? No solid surface above! 3rd Street is, of course, part of the truck route and a main artery in and out of the city. Colarusso's trucks utilize 3rd Street daily with great frequency.
After Mr. Perry was finished with explanation #2 at the May 2022 council meeting, I asked him the following question: "You said last month at the meeting that the problem was the subbase but that you didn't have the material or time to replace it. Is that correct?"
Perry responded: "I don't think I said that."
It's difficult to know who the "we" is/are that Mr. Perry so frequently referenced during his explanations since Colarusso was hired to do all the repaving work and they did the work themselves. Notice how there is no admission of fault for the poorly repaved street, like "DPW screwed up," or "Colarusso screwed up." Instead, it's just "We did this," and "We did that." I think you call that deflection or obfuscation. Who is this "we" Perry spoke of when Colarusso signed a contract to repave our streets? DPW hired a professional road building company to replace several city streets, then the DPW Superintendent instructed Colarusso how to proceed properly with the construction of one street after a serious issue arose. Our DPW Superintendent, according to his own public recollections, did not ask Colarusso what the best course of action would be to ensure that the street would be properly built. Instead, he told Colarusso, who was under contract to repave our streets, what to do about a "subbase with some issues." If Mr. Perry did ask Colarusso what they thought should be done about the "subbase with issues," he did not admit to that at any meetings.
Do you really think that in the fall of 2017 Colarusso knew "most of the subbase had some issues" after they ripped up the asphalt and that they went ahead repaving South 3rd Street anyway, essentially ignoring the bad subbase and paving over it? How is Colarusso even in the road building business if, indeed, Mr. Perry's explanations are accurate? Was this the first time Colarusso ever ripped open a street, in Hudson or elsewhere, and noticed or were shown a bad subbase or some other issue that could easily adversely affect the integrity of the new asphalt they were preparing to apply? Surely not.
If you are a respectable home builder and your client wants you to build them a new house on top of an obviously crumbling foundation, what do you do? If you want to stay in business and sleep well at night, you advise the client that it is not in anyone's best interest to do such a thing and, as the hired professional, you tell the client what to do: "Have someone replace the goddamn foundation, then call me back!" If that doesn't work and the client attempts to tell you what to do ("build my house!") you say GOODBYE, GOOD LUCK and you leave.
According to documents I received from NY State DOT, the 2017 South 3rd Street repaving job cost the taxpayers of New York State exactly $26,507.76. DPW began replacing Colarusso's failed work last spring --less than 5 years after the fall 2017 project. DOT expects the streets repaved under the CHIPs program to last at least ten years, so they will not pay to have South 3rd Street repaved until 2027. All 7 of the city streets in the 2017 repaving project, including South 3rd street, were described as "Hwy resurfacing. Cold milling with hot mix asphalt replacement," according to the DOT document. None of the other 6 sections of streets had the same problem that South 3rd street did. Colarusso took home over $290,000 for repaving sections of 7 city streets that year.
It's really difficult to believe Mr. Perry's explanation about the bad subbase. If the subbase is two feet below the surface of the street, how did DPW or Colarusso know about it when Colarusso removed the asphalt, which is only a few inches thick? Does anyone really think that, if asked, Paul Colarusso, the president of A. Colarusso and Son, would respond "That's right, Rob Perry pointed out the bad subbase under South 3rd Street in 2017 and we ignored it as he instructed us to do. We paved over it, and like Mr. Perry, we hoped for the best." There are a lot of different feelings about our neighbors Colarusso, but them being dumb is not one of them. Dumb businessmen and businesses regularly doing dumb things never stay in business very long, no matter the business.
How is attention to the integrity of a subbase not part of a street repaving project? How is it not mentioned in the contract, perhaps in a clause? Such as: If the subbase is found to be in need of replacement, company will not pave over said faulty subbase. Work will cease, the city will renegotiate the contract and the subbase will be replaced. It doesn't take a professional paver to know that when you start digging below streets, you are going to encounter unanticipated issues needing attention. You better have some sort of contingency plan when it happens, or you will be rolling the dice. Hudson DPW apparently opted to roll the dice in 2017 and lost. Indeed, the contracts they have Colarusso sign are designed to roll the dice if a subbase or similar issue arises, because, as Mr. Perry stated: "That wasn't in their contract."
Without a clause of some sort, you only set yourself up for trouble down the road, so to speak. What if the 6 other streets repaved in 2017 all also had subbase issues that went ignored and paved over and that no one but Rob Perry knew about? Maybe the other 6 streets will all start failing tomorrow because Colarusso paved over a "subbase with issues" under each street. Then what? It's unimaginable that the word subbase wouldn't be found in a contract meant for a professional paving contractor. It's also unimaginable that a heavy highway contractor would sign a contract that does not have a clause about faulty subbases, let alone mention the word "subbase." Anyway, even if the contract mentioned the word "subbase," it didn't do us any good.
My opinion is that one of the following two things happened in 2017: Either Colarusso used a bad batch of asphalt on South 3rd Street, whether or not the subbase was even an unseen issue or was discovered. The subbase was not the problem; the asphalt was. Except the ensuing problems didn't appear on any other streets, which leads me to theory 2.
Since replacing the entire subbase along South 3rd Street was going to require a whole lot more expense by turning into a reconstruction project, Rob Perry decided, as he explained, to try his luck, go "heavy on the binder" and pave over the "subbase with some issues." It had little or nothing to do with time, material, or the scope of the project. Rather, since DPW's budget couldn't cover that enormous and unexpected expense and since DOT only allocates a limited amount of money every other year for new streets, the bad subbase would have to wait.
Reconstructing South 3rd Street properly would likely have eaten up most of, all of, or more than the amount of money that DOT would cover. That would have looked really bad and put Mr. Perry in a bind, forcing 6 other sections of city streets to go untouched for at least another two years. And other streets in need of repaving would also have had to wait another two years, and so on and so on, creating a cascading effect of delay and more streets in need of attention for the foreseeable future. It seems that in 2017 the city simply couldn't afford to fix a serious issue they had no plan for or expectation of. But we are paying for reconstructing 3rd Street now and the State of New York is not assisting us.
Have the reasons for the 2 blocks of failed and failing asphalt on South 3rd Street in Hudson been fully and honestly explained?
Note: All references to comments made at council meetings came directly from archived YouTube videos of the meetings that should still be available on the internet.
Stay tuned for Part II of this multi-part series -- coming soon.
It gets even more unbelievable.
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| 5 years later, this is what we have |
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