Motorists using Kingsport Highway and Chuckey Pike are experiencing new, rougher pavement that officials with the Tennessee Department of Transportation say can stretch the state's paving budget.

Randy Busler, of Knoxville, TDOT's Region 1 assistant construction supervisor, said Monday in a telephone interview that about eight miles of the Kingsport Highway (state Route 93) and seven miles of the Chuckey Highway (state Route 351) were recently "micro-surfaced" with an asphalt-based product that costs only between one-third and half the cost of conventional asphalt paving.

"It's all about money," said TDOT spokesperson Travis Brickey, also of Knoxville, in the same interview.

Brickey said TDOT is targeting roads that have lower average daily traffic for mircosurfacing because "it's much cheaper to do (microsurfacing) than to do a full-blown resurfacing project with asphalt."

Busler said microsurfacing costs about $20,000 per lane-mile, meaning it costs that much to resurface one lane for one mile, compared with somewhere between $65,000 and $70,000 per lane-mile for conventional asphalt resurfacing.

Microsurfacing works well where the intention is to preserve the working life of existing pavement, Busler said, and can "extend the life of an existing asphalt roadway for six to 10 years."

The new paving, which has been in place for about three weeks, has not pleased everybody using the two resurfaced local roads.

One merchant along Kingsport Highway said the new pavement is rougher than the pavement it replaced, which was still in good shape. "I don't know why they would ruin a perfectly good road," said the merchant, who asked not to be identified.

He added that the pavement is louder to drive on than normal asphalt, and rougher. "I don't know anybody that likes it," he said.

Others raised questions about tire wear. Brickey said he has seen no studies about tire wear on microsurfaced roads, compared to regular asphalt.

Micro-surfacing is applied about three-eights of an inch thick, Busler said. It has a coarser texture because it includes crushed aggregate, or stone.

Conventional asphalt resurfacing is usually more than an inch thick, and is smoother than microsurfacing.

Microsurfacing is also suitable for situations where road surfaces have become slippery, Brickey said, but in Greene County, it is being used strictly to save money.

Tennessee's state road system has traditionally been rated high for smoothness by the trucking industry. Until recent years, state highways were on a 12-year resurfacing schedule.

"That's what we would like to be on," Busler said, referring to the 12-year cycle, but the cost of asphalt has doubled annually in recent years, forcing changes.

Brickey said that although motorists have experienced gasoline price hikes for several years now, and gasoline is at record high prices, the state's gasoline tax per gallon has not been increased since 1989.

That means that the state is having to do the same amount of paving with less money, or try to, despite increases in material costs, he said. Revenues from the gasoline tax "have been flat," Brickey said, while gasoline prices at the pump have doubled and doubled again.

As a state agency, "We (at TDOT) have to live within those means," Brickey said.

Basler said the state first used microsurfacing in East Tennessee in the 1990s, when low-traffic roadways in Jefferson County and Sullivan County were microsurfaced.

In addition to the two Greene County microsurfacing projects this summer, Basler said about 22 miles of roads in Monroe County have been microsurfaced this year, and "five or six" miles of state Route 31 in Hawkins County.

Brickey said the four local projects this summer totaled $871,931. The contractor is Slurry Pavers Inc., of Glen Allen, Va.

Brickey pointed out that "TDOT is a low-bid agency, by law," and if an out-of-state contractor has the lowest bid and meets specifications, it gets the project.