Concrete Repair in Cottage Grove, Minnesota.

Cottage Grove takes a building permit before anyone makes a curb cut or puts in a driveway or a parking lot, and a city right-of-way permit before the work starts. If a property adds or moves a curb cut, section 7-2-2 makes the applicant close the old one, take the driveway out and repair the curb, all at the applicant's expense. The city publishes a standard detail plate, STR-21, for a concrete commercial driveway apron or curb and gutter tying into an existing street, so the replacement gets drawn to the city's own section. On snow the city clears the sidewalks and trails it calls safety routes within 48 hours after the snow stops, and the low use ones are the adjacent property owner's. The lots this shows up on are the 253-acre logistics park and the business park off US 61 at the Jamaica exit, and the retail along East Point Douglas Road South.

Four things take concrete apart here, and each one goes after a different part of a property. A sidewalk panel sits on saturated ground or over a root. The water under it freezes, expands and lifts the panel. In spring the ground thaws and settles, and the panel does not go all the way back down with it, so what was flush in October is a lip in April. Then a plow blade catches that lip every storm for five months and breaks the leading edge off it. A curb takes the plow head on. The blade rides up the gutter, catches the curb face and takes the nose off in chunks. Salted slush sits in the gutter longer than anywhere else on the lot, because the gutter is where everything on the lot drains to, so the gutter is where the surface scales first. De-icer does the same thing to flat concrete. Chloride pulls water into the surface and runs more freeze and thaw cycles through it in a season than the weather would on its own. The mortar skin comes off in flakes and the aggregate stands proud. The approach at the street is a joint between two slabs that belong to different people. The street sits on a road section and a deep base; the drive sits on whatever was there. Frost gets under the shallower one first, the apron cracks along the gutter line, and that crack takes water into the base under both of them.