Overland Park has earmarked about $4.4 million for annual street preservation work in 2025 using the long-debated chip seal method.
The work this year will cover roughly 140 lane miles of city streets.
It comes as city leaders say they’re still working to reduce the city’s reliance on the street preservation method that’s proved controversial over the years.
On Monday, the Overland Park City Council unanimously approved two bid tabulations tied to 2025 chip seal projects, awarding the work to Vance Brothers LLC.
Initially, the two items were listed as part of the consent agenda, and the city council would have approved them alongside a series of other items from committees in one vote without discussion. However, Councilmember Scott Mosher requested the measures be pulled to the regular agenda for more talk about chip seal.
How does chip seal work?
The chip seal process occurs when crews lay “liquid asphalt to seal the road” and follow that up with “a thin layer of rock” that serves to “protect the [asphalt] seal,” according to city documents.
Some residents have complained about the use of chip seal, particularly worried about the quality of the treatment in some years creating hazards. But still, it’s one of the most cost-effective street preservation tools available to the city, officials say.
In 2025, Overland Park plans to spend about $4.4 million in chip seal preservation projects, touching 139 lane miles.
That’s on par with the number of lane miles the city completed with chip seal in 2024 but significantly less than in previous years, when Overland Park had done up to 200 lane miles using the method.
Chip seal projects are planned across Overland Park
- This year, Overland Park plans to use chip seal on 130 lane miles of neighborhood and collector streets in the northern and central parts of the city, including in the Nall Hills neighborhood.
- Additionally, the city plans to use chip seal on about 10 miles of unimproved thoroughfares in southern Overland Park, including Antioch Road between 191st and roughly 205th streets.
- Find the full map for 2025 chip seal projects here.
Chip seal has fueled controversy in Overland Park
The use of chip seal as a street preservation method was the source of some local controversy in Overland Park and even became a flashpoint in some municipal elections, including the 2021 mayoral election.
Opponents of the method have complained about the debris chip seal can create and the loose rock that can be picked up by tires while driving on it.
City leaders have defended the use of the method, with Public Works Director Lorraine Basalo saying this week that it is “effective in extending the useful life of our infrastructure, and it is cost efficient.”
Eventually, the city formed a special infrastructure group that recommended Overland Park reduce its reliance on chip seal, among other things. That became a focal point of the expanded sales tax city voters eventually approved in summer 2023.
Basalo said that extra revenue from the expanded sales tax has allowed Overland Park to cut down on its reliance on chip seal by making more funds available for more costly preservation methods, like mill and overlay.
Also, Basalo said that while Overland Park plans to do roughly the same number of lane miles in 2025 as it did in 2024 with chip seal, the method’s use makes up a smaller proportion of the full slate of street preservation projects planned this year at about 61%. Last year, chip seal made up about 65% of the city’s street preservation projects.
That’s because Overland Park has planned to cover more lane miles this year with street preservation projects, which would include chip seal as well as about 50 lane miles of mill and overlay and about 40 lane miles of yet another street resurfacing method, ultrathin bonded asphalt surface.
“We have in our programs, from one year to the next, been able to reduce reliance on chip seal,” she said. “Each year, we will continue to try to do that.”
Next steps:
- Overland Park typically works on its chip seal and other street preservation projects in the spring, summer and early fall.
- Basalo said the expectation is to start work this year in late May or early June and wrap it all up sometime in September.
- Weather permitting, sometimes the city completes all of its chip seal work in August.
- The city disperses notices to neighborhoods getting chip seal a couple of weeks in advance and then again a few days before work officially begins.
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