Each of these has a page written about Tomah specifically.
The sealable surface in Tomah is spread out rather than stacked up: the VA campus covers 174 acres, the plants and the distribution buildings each sit on their own yard, and the district has eight elementary schools plus a middle and a high school. On properties like that the estimate is a measuring job before it's anything else, because square footage on a big yard is easy to be wrong about by eye. Sealer only goes on clean, dry pavement, so the sweeping and the crack work come first.
Crack Filling and Sealing
A crack in a car lot opens with the frost. A crack in a truck lane opens with the frost and then gets worked wider every time a loaded trailer rolls across it, which is why the yards around the plants and the distribution buildings show it first. Routing gives the rubber a clean wall to grab, and hot pour at 400 degrees stays flexible through the winter instead of pulling loose. Spring and early fall are when the cracks sit at a width worth working on.
Asphalt Repair and Patching
The city says outright that freight companies locate here because I-90 and I-94 divide in town, and truck traffic is what sets the repair list on this end of the corridor. Dock approaches, the apron where a trailer swings in, and the lane just inside a gate are where the base gives out. Those get saw cut back to sound asphalt, the base dug out and rebuilt to something that compacts, then hot mix rolled in flush with what's around it. Cold patch holds it through February and no longer.
A 174-acre campus and a set of flat truck yards put a lot of water into not many structures, so each one is carrying more than it looks like. The tell is never the casting, it's the ring of broken asphalt around it, and by then the frame has been settling for years. Rebuilding it means the structure, a new collar and the asphalt keyed back in at a pitch that still runs water to the grate. In a truck lane the collar has to take the load that broke the last one.
The VA campus runs numbered buildings across 174 acres, so a lot of the striping question there is a driver finding the right building the first time, not just fitting stalls. Medical lots mean ADA stalls and access aisles at the federal dimensions, marked crossings between the lots and the doors, and fire lanes. On the freight side it's trailer stalls, truck routes through a yard, and drive aisles wide enough for a rig to make the turn without cutting the corner. A restripe goes down after the sealer has cured.
Track and Athletic Surfaces
The Tomah Area School District runs eight elementary schools, Tomah Middle School and Tomah High School on Lincoln Avenue, a little over 3,000 students in all, and the teams play in the Mississippi Valley Conference. In November 2024 voters turned down a capital referendum that would have built a new high school, so the buildings and the surfaces around them are the ones staying in service. Track and court work is summer work, and what's under a surface decides what the job actually is.
Dock aprons are the concrete that matters most in Tomah. A trailer parked on its landing gear puts a load on one small patch and leaves it there for hours, and an apron poured like a sidewalk cracks under that in a couple of seasons. Dumpster pads behind the retail on West McCoy Boulevard are the other regular one, and it's the truck that empties the container that decides how thick a pad has to be. Curb and gutter runs through the newer commercial ground off the interstate.
Tomah's excavation permit covers the sidewalk and the curb and gutter, not just the street, and it comes from the Director of Public Works and Utilities or the Building Inspector. The city sets a floor on how the concrete goes back in: six inches of concrete over six inches of three-quarter-inch crushed aggregate, or match what was there, whichever is more. Past nine square feet the city does the right-of-way restoration itself and bills the permit holder for it. Approval can take ten business days, the permit runs three months from the date it's approved, and there's an added charge for opening ground between November 1 and April 15. The big campuses are the VA Medical Center on 174 acres off East Veterans Street and Western Technical College on East Milwaukee Street, with the retail out on West McCoy Boulevard.
Monroe County lists three Tomah properties as shovel-ready, I-90 Corridor Land, Meadows Park and Forward Tomah Land, most of them inside tax increment districts. On new ground the base is the whole job: graded, compacted and drained before mix goes anywhere near it. A yard that's going to take loaded trailers gets built for that traffic rather than for a car lot, and that's a decision made before paving, not after the first winter.
