SALISBURY — The Salisbury City Council has allocated its 2024 street resurfacing contract to NJR Group, Inc., an Albemarle-based construction company, for $1,081,989.

In 2022, Salisbury hired TransSystems to conduct a pavement condition survey and create a five-year capital improvement plan that led to forming the list the city bids out annually for paving. Salisbury is now in the second year of the CIP paving list.

Public Works Director Chris Tester said a little over nine lane miles are going to be resurfaced this year. On Feb. 22, Salisbury received four bids and NJR Group, Inc. was the lowest. Tester said around seven lane miles were paved in 2023 and that the city has averaged six to seven miles per year.

“By increasing the fee, we have increased the mileage that we are able to achieve. Also, by doing different preservation methods,” Tester said.

NJR Group, Inc. will be conducting two kinds of repaving techniques: mill and fill and thin lift. Mill and fill is where 1.5 inches of asphalt is ground off and replaced with new resurfacing asphalt. Thin lift is where three-quarters of an inch of “preservation treatment” is added to the street surface to lengthen its lifespan. There will be significantly more mill and fill projects compared to thin lifts.

The plan is to repave certain downtown streets, streets near Livingstone College, streets on Jake Alexander Boulevard, and streets south of downtown.

Tester said they have focused on specific areas in the past to save money on transporting the paving equipment, but this time they used national standards to find out which streets are in need of the most attention.

“There’s a lot of methods to the madness of creating that list,” Tester said. “It’s really based on the scientific method of choosing the correct streets so that you’re not losing those streets before you get to other streets.”

Salisbury initially budgeted $1 million for street paving in this year’s budget, which is less than the contract amount. However, the remaining $82,000 will be covered by the $124,192 in Powell Bill revenue the city was given. The Powell Bill comes from the North Carolina Department of Transportation and is used to “resurface municipal streets but also may be used to maintain, repair, construct, or widen streets, bridges, and drainage areas.”

Tester said the contract will be written as a ”not-to-exceed contract.” Public Works will have an engineering tech “out in the field” on a regular basis to ensure all estimations are as precise as possible and that nothing goes over cost.