Somers, Wisconsin

Concrete driveways, patios and slabs in Somers

Somers runs its driveway rules through Public Works and its drainage through open ditches, which makes the end of a Somers driveway a different job from the end of one a few miles south. What that changes, before anybody quotes.

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We pour concrete across Kenosha County, and Somers is the part of it where the paperwork least resembles everybody else's. Worth ten minutes before you collect quotes, because two of the items below routinely appear on nobody's bid.

The culvert is the permit here

In a village of curb-and-gutter subdivisions, the conversation at the road is about the apron. In Somers it is frequently about the culvert, because a great many properties meet the road across an open ditch rather than a kerb.

The Village requires a permit from its Public Works Department before any drainage culvert goes into a street, road or drainage way under Village jurisdiction. That is not a formality processed at a counter: no permit issues until the Public Works Foreman has been out to the site and determined the grade, the size and the length of what is going in, along with whatever else the location needs to drain properly.

The Village fee is $35, paid at application, together with the other costs the code attaches. The real money is in the work rather than the fee, but the sequence is the point: an inspection has to happen before anybody can commit to a date.

The dimensions are not the contractor's to choose

The Foreman sets the size, but within a frame the code fixes:

• Minimum 15 inches in diameter.
• End flares required.
• Maximum 24 feet 0 inches, including the flared end sections.
• Anything longer needs a written appeal to the Board of Appeals.

That last one matters on a wide frontage or a double entrance. It is a straightforward thing to raise at the start and an awkward one to discover after a design is agreed.

The clause worth asking Public Works about directly

The same subsection says culverts are to be covered or paved with materials compatible with the existing public street or right-of-way, and then adds, in the code's own words, "except that concrete driveway approaches are prohibited, with the Public Road right-of-way".

We are quoting it rather than paraphrasing it because the sentence is awkward in the original and it sits inside the culvert rules rather than in a general driveway section. What it plainly is not, is an invitation to assume a concrete approach is available in the right-of-way here the way it would be elsewhere.

So the honest advice for a Somers property is: ask Public Works what is permitted at your road before anybody prices the section beyond your property line. A contractor who has worked here will already know the answer for your stretch of road. One who quotes a concrete approach without checking has not read the code.

Ditches change the job, not just the paperwork

Where a road has no curbing, the code sets the ditch shape at two feet of side slope for every foot of depth. That is a real physical constraint on how a driveway can meet the road: the transition has to work with the ditch profile rather than cut across it, and water still has to get past your entrance to wherever it was going.

Practically, that is why Somers driveways more often need thought about levels at the road end than a subdivision drive does, and why the site visit matters more here than the measurements do.

What we lay in Somers

• Concrete driveways, new and replacement, with the road end handled to whatever your stretch actually requires.
• Concrete patios, paths and sitting areas, which sit on your own ground and are far simpler to schedule than anything at the road.
• Concrete repair, including panels cut out and re-poured and aprons rebuilt.
• Garage, shed and pole barn slabs, and steps.

How a Somers job runs

Reading before you commit

• what a driveway costs around here, and what moves it
• whether yours needs replacing or only repairing
• what sits underneath any slab price