Scott County changed faster than almost anywhere around Lexington once Toyota came to Georgetown. The plant broke ground in May 1986 and started building cars in May 1988, and the county has been filling with new homes ever since. That growth, and the spring Georgetown drinks from, shape how asphalt work is done here.
Georgetown and its subdivisions, Stamping Ground and Sadieville, and the rural roads between them. Send the address wherever you are in the county.
Census counts show Scott County at under 24,000 people in 1990 and more than 57,000 by 2020. Toyota describes the Georgetown plant as its largest vehicle manufacturing plant in the world, able to build 550,000 vehicles a year, and it brought the jobs, the suppliers and the housing that followed.
So most of the county's driveways are young by Bluegrass standards, laid in waves from the 1990s on. The oldest of those are now twenty to thirty years old, the age when a drive that was never sealed has lost most of its surface binder, the stone is showing, and cracks are spreading from the garage joint and the street edge. Newer drives, a few years old, are the easiest and cheapest to look after: a first coat of sealer once the asphalt has cured, then crack filling and resealing every few years. Walk down a Georgetown street and you can usually tell which phase of a subdivision went in when by the colour of the drives.
Georgetown Municipal Water and Sewer Service draws the city's water from Royal Spring, a natural groundwater spring in Georgetown, and describes that water as filtered naturally through rock and soil. In limestone country, water that disappears into the ground does not stay put; it moves through the rock and comes out at springs.
That is reason enough to keep sealing work tidy. Sealer and crack filler stay on the asphalt. Equipment is not rinsed into storm drains, ditches or low spots, and leftover material goes home with the crew rather than into the ground. A job is not started with rain on the way, both because rain ruins a fresh coat and because it would carry uncured material off the drive. None of this costs you anything; it is simply how the work should be done over a karst aquifer.
Georgetown's City Engineer requires a right-of-way encroachment permit for any work within the public right-of-way the city controls or owns, and names driveway aprons alongside streets, sidewalks and utility work. So replacing or widening the apron where a Georgetown drive meets the street needs that permit first. The city's page does not publish the fee, so it is confirmed with the City Engineer's office and written on your quote.
Outside the city, where a drive meets a county road, we ask the county before quoting entrance work, since no process is published online. Where it meets a state route, the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet's District 7 office in Lexington issues the encroachment permit. Entrance work is only booked with a paving contractor able to obtain whichever permit applies. Sealing, crack filling and patching on your own property need none.
Leave Georgetown's subdivisions behind and the county turns rural quickly. Out toward Stamping Ground and Sadieville, homes sit further back on longer drives that meet a country road at a gravel shoulder or a ditch rather than a curb. Those drives age differently from a subdivision drive: they get more sun, less traffic, and edges with nothing to hold them. The usual pattern is a sound middle, a crumbling edge along the grass, and a broken entrance where the drive meets the road and every vehicle turns. The middle needs crack filling and sealer; the edges and entrance need cutting back and rebuilding, and entrance work is checked against the county or state rules first. Sealing a long rural drive stops at the road's edge on a clean line.
Many Georgetown neighbourhoods have an association and shared entrance areas, and neighbours often compare quotes over the fence. When several homes on one street want sealing, doing them on the same day is easier on everyone: one set of cones, one notice, one curing window. Each household still gets its own quote and pays for its own drive. For the association's own asphalt, see HOAs and property managers.
Once it has had six to twelve months to cure, and then every few years as it needs it, not every year.
Not for sealing on your property. The city's encroachment permit is for work in the right-of-way, including the apron.
Next door: Fayette County to the south and Woodford County to the southwest.
