PRINT ADS

West Salem High School’s track and field facility will get a mini-makeover this summer.

The district will spend $45,350 to resurface the track and runways while repairing structural cracks on the track. The cost includes other maintenance care, such as trimming vegetation for proper water drainage and repainting lines.

The school board’s building and grounds committee discussed repairing the track facility, and the board approved the project at its May 27 meeting.

“Could you push it off another year?” rhetorically asked board member Henry Althoff, who also chairs the building and grounds committee. “You might be able to get away with it, but we might as well belly-up to it.”

The project will include repairing 11 structural cracks that span the width of the track. Superintendent Nancy Burns said repairing the cracks would alleviate liability issues.

“One severe knee injury would cost the (school) district more than $40,000,” Burns said. “And it would damage a student, and we don’t want that.”

The majority of the project cost — just over $42,000 — is resealing and resurfacing the track’s runways with a rubber surface; those areas include the track itself and runways for the long jump, high jump and pole vault.

The last renovation to the track complex, built in the early 1990s, was done in 2000, and similar repairs were completed. School district maintenance supervisor Mark Ledman said resurfacing the track and its runways is a part of ongoing maintenance to the facility that occurs about every eight years.

“Every eight years we need to add a couple layers of this running surface as the top wears,” Ledman said. “Another eight years we’ll be in the same spot.”

Cracks in the track are not uncommon, Ledman said, and it is similar to how cracks form and re-emerge on roadways. When runways were resurfaced eight years ago, Ledman said the structural cracks already existed, but it has been more inexpensive to simply repair them.

“We had two options at that time. We could tear up the track and start over — which would have been expensive — or the other option that we chose was to repair the structural cracks and put a rubber surface over it,” Ledman said. “We know, that with time, these (cracks) will transfer through. At some point (we) will need to go in and tear the whole thing up and redo it, but that will be some time from now.”

Athletic Field Service out of Genesee Depot, Wis., will complete the project. Ledman said the project will likely begin in July and be finished within two weeks.