Dubois County road crews to begin summer chip and seal work in June

Dubois County road crews will open their summer maintenance season in the first week of June with chip and seal work, then move into overlays as the county pushes through about two months of pavement repairs.

The Highway Department says the work is aimed at preserving roads before small surface problems turn into bigger failures. Chip and seal is used to seal cracks and protect the pavement below it, while overlays add a fresh driving surface and extend the life of the road. The county did not list a single chip-and-seal location in its announcement, which means the work is likely to move from roadway to roadway across the county rather than concentrate on one site.

That matters in Jasper, Huntingburg, Ferdinand, Holland and the rural parts of Dubois County, where drivers depend on county roads for commuting, farm traffic, deliveries, school runs and church travel. Residents should expect slower travel, equipment in the roadway and short delays as crews shift through the summer program.

The county’s road system is large enough to make that scheduling a major public works task. The Dubois County Highway Department says it has 31 employees and maintains 660 miles of county roads, including 384 miles of hot-mix asphalt, 143 miles of chip-seal surface, 112 miles of gravel and 21 miles of dirt roads. It also maintains 164 bridges over 20 feet long and more than 5,000 signs and markers.

The summer workload goes beyond chip and seal. County highway operations include roadside mowing, brush cutting, ditch management, bridge and culvert replacement, road paving and patching, surface treatment application and centerline striping. Commissioners supervise road and bridge maintenance, making the summer schedule a countywide governance issue as well as a transportation one.

Levi Leffert said the 2026 Roadway Treatment Plan was confirmed and includes asphalt overlays, Rejuvtec applications, chip seal patching, gravel-to-chip-seal conversions, chip seal overlays and rubberized crack sealant. The county plans to treat about 72.55 miles of roadway this year. Officials also said the 2026 road-and-bridge package came in with nearly $100,000 in savings, while keeping the full project list intact.

Bridge work is already part of that same maintenance calendar. Bridge 78 on County Road 600 West and Division Road over the Patoka River was scheduled for a closure that could last up to 60 days. Bridge 107 and Bridge 240 were expected to begin work in early May with 4- to 5-week closures, and Bridge 119 on Club Road was reported ahead of schedule.

The county’s gravel-road-to-chip/seal conversion policy, effective June 3, 2019, was designed to better organize and extend county finances, with petitions scored and re-evaluated on a winter schedule. That structure helps explain why June’s chip and seal program is not a one-off patch job, but part of a planned effort to keep Dubois County’s roads and bridges serviceable through the summer and beyond.