Each of these has a page written about La Crosse specifically.
Wisconsin has no statewide coal tar ban and La Crosse County hasn't passed one, and we run an asphalt emulsion either way, which is worth knowing if your management spec has a line about it. The lots that get sealed here are the hospital campuses on South Avenue and West Avenue South, the college lots, and the office and retail lots along Highway 16 and up by the interstate. A campus gets measured area by area, because a patient lot, a staff lot and a service drive are three different jobs on the same property. Sealer protects the top of the asphalt, so anything failing underneath gets handled before it goes on.
Crack Filling and Sealing
The city sits under bluffs that run close to 600 feet, on ground with the bedrock near the surface and loess and colluvium over the valley walls. What a lot needs out of crack filling is the same as anywhere: water kept out of the base before the frost gets hold of it. Wide cracks get routed to a clean face and hot rubber goes in at 400 degrees so it bonds and stays flexible, where cold pour lifts out in strips. On a hospital or a college lot the crack list runs long, so it gets priced by measured footage rather than by the worst few.
Asphalt Repair and Patching
A distribution yard that runs around the clock never gets a quiet season, and pavement that never rests fails where the trucks turn and where they sit. Ambulance approaches and emergency entrances at the two hospital campuses are the other places a failure can't be left. Full depth means saw cutting back to sound asphalt, digging the base out to something that compacts, rebuilding it, and rolling hot mix in flush. A surface patch over a failed base comes back the next spring.
Campus lots here are big and flat and they put a lot of water into a few structures. When a catch basin frame settles, the ring of asphalt around it breaks up and the lot's low point moves off the grate, which is how a lot ends up with standing water nowhere near the drain. Fixing it is the structure, a new collar and the asphalt keyed back in at the pitch that drains to it. The structures under a snow pile take the worst of any winter.
Between two hospital systems, three college campuses and the airport, La Crosse has more lots with rules attached to them than anywhere else on this end of the road. ADA stalls and access aisles go in at the federal dimensions on the shortest accessible route to an entrance, fire lanes get marked, and loading zones, permit rows and drop-off lanes have to read on the first pass for a driver who's never been there. Layouts get measured and chalked before paint, and a restripe over a sealed lot waits for the sealer to cure.
Track and Athletic Surfaces
The School District of La Crosse runs two public high schools, Central on Losey Boulevard South, in a building finished in 1967, and Logan on Ranger Drive, and it has its own buildings and grounds department. UW-La Crosse's campus is 128 acres and Viterbo's is about 21. What's under a track or a court, and whether the surface is asphalt at all, decides what the job is, so it gets looked at before it gets priced. This is summer work.
The concrete on these properties is ambulance bays, dock aprons, curb and gutter, and the walks and ramps at every entrance. A dock apron carries the landing gear of a parked trailer, which is a standing point load, so it gets poured thicker and reinforced for that instead of matched to the walk beside it. Curb ramps and crossings on a hospital or campus lot are ADA work and get built to the federal dimensions. The asphalt around a pour gets keyed back in so the joint doesn't open the first winter.
Airport Industrial Park is full at 21 lots over about 95 acres, and La Crosse International Business Park north of I-90 has five lots left between 1.15 and 3.4 acres, so new-ground paving here is mostly those and whatever comes out of the River Point District downtown. Everywhere else the question is overlay or tear-out. An overlay is right when the base is sound and the surface is worn; a tear-out is right when the base is the problem, because a new mat over a bad base reflects the same cracks through by the second winter. On new ground the base gets graded, compacted and drained before any mix goes down.
