Concrete Repair in Maplewood, Minnesota.

Maplewood's special assessment policy, adopted in 2010 and readopted in January 2020, covers streets, sidewalks, trails, curb and gutter, and on commercial and multi-family property the charge is figured on frontage. The policy caps the assessment at the benefit the property actually gets, settled by appraisal. The city does not repair every walk on a schedule; Public Works logs the reports it gets and works the repair and replacement list out of them, so a bad panel in front of a business gets on that list when somebody reports it. Work in the right of way runs through the right-of-way ordinance the council adopted in December 2017. The commercial frontage here is Beam Avenue at the mall, Birch Run Station and St. John's Hospital, and the industrial buildings along the Highway 36 and Gervais Avenue corridor.

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.