Each of these has a page written about Stillwater specifically.
Minnesota's coal tar ban has been in force since 2014, so no coal tar sealer goes on asphalt anywhere in the state and a management spec that says so is repeating the law. We run an asphalt emulsion, Pitch Black. The lots worth sealing here are the county campus on 62nd Street, the hospital on Churchill, the Highway 36 retail on Market Drive and the business park buildings along Curve Crest and Tower Drive. Downtown is a different job, because the surface lots along the river are the city's public parking rather than a property's own.
Crack Filling and Sealing
The ground here is sandy glacial outwash, excessively drained sand and sandy loam, and MnDOT has wanted 30 to 36 inches of frost-free material under asphalt since 1995. Downtown carries the oldest surfaces in the city, and it's where the crack list runs longest. Wide cracks get routed to a clean face first, then hot rubber at 400 degrees, which bonds to the walls and stays flexible through the winter where cold pour lifts out in strips by spring. Spring and early fall are the months for it.
Asphalt Repair and Patching
Downtown Stillwater has roughly 760 surface parking spaces, most of them along the river, and those are the oldest surfaces in the city. A pothole there starts where it starts everywhere, with water in an open crack that freezes and lifts. The repair is saw-cut back to sound asphalt, the failed base dug out and rebuilt in lifts, hot mix rolled in flush and the joint sealed. Out on 36 the failures are in the delivery lanes behind the retail rather than in the customer parking.
Stillwater has held MS4 permit coverage since 2007, and because the city drains to the St. Croix, an Outstanding Resource Value Water, it filed a restricted waters assessment; part of the city also sits inside the Brown's Creek Watershed District. That makes the structures in a lot part of a system the city has to report on. The tell on a failed one is the asphalt breaking up in a ring around the grate rather than anything wrong with the grate. Rebuilt means the structure reset to grade, a new collar and the asphalt saw-cut back and keyed in at the right pitch.
The county campus on 62nd Street and the hospital on Churchill are public lots, which means ADA stalls and access aisles at the federal dimensions, fire lanes marked, and a layout somebody can read the first time through. Downtown is the other kind: a paid ramp with 248 spaces a block west of Main and roughly 760 surface spaces, with free 90-minute parking on Main Street and four-hour parking west of it, so the markings and the signs have to agree with each other. Anything past a straight restripe gets measured and chalked before paint goes down.
Track and Athletic Surfaces
Stillwater Area Public Schools covers 18 communities and sends every high schooler to one high school, and that building sits over the line in Oak Park Heights rather than in Stillwater. Its running track is indoors, in the Pony Activity Center, and Pony Stadium went to artificial turf in the 2017 project. So a track job for this district isn't a Stillwater address, and what's here is court and hard-surface work. Court layouts get measured and chalked rather than eyeballed, and anything that has opened up gets hot rubber at 400 degrees before a surface goes over it.
Dumpster pads behind the downtown businesses and the Highway 36 retail, dock aprons in the business park off Curve Crest, curb and gutter around the county campus and the hospital. A pad is poured for the front axle of the truck that empties the container rather than for the container itself. Commercial pours go down at 4,500 PSI with tied rebar, and the asphalt around the pour gets tied back in as part of the same work.
There's a new hospital going up at Highway 36 and Manning Avenue, six stories and about 400,000 square feet with 97 beds, roughly twice the size of the current campus, and Central Commons is planned on the southeast corner of the same intersection with a grocery store and about 200 apartments. New pavement on that scale goes down on a base that's graded, compacted and drained. On an existing lot the question is overlay or tear out, and it's the base that answers it rather than the surface. New asphalt waits six to twelve months for its first seal.
