Back in the glory days of municipal finance, cities didn't hold press conferences to crow over the number of miles of streets improved with the preventive maintenance technique known as sealcoating. But there were the 18.7 miles of sealcoating done in Minneapolis this year, listed among the 45.35 of streets given new driving surfaces in the Mill City this year. Mayor R.T. Rybak and City Engineer Steve Kotke held a press conference Monday to mark the end of the paving season, with Rybak trying to show he's gotten the message from motorists about potholed streets. Sealcoating used to be considered routine maintenance by street engineers. A coating of tar topped with rock chips was applied every 10 years or so to a street to slow its deterioration. But as city finances have tightened, sealcoating has virtually disappeared from city residential streets. The city's paving program this year was bolstered this year by two sources. One is $2.3 million in federal money awarded to the city to recondition downtown and riverfront streets after detours caused by the Interstate 35W bridge collapse. The other is an extra $3.31 million for paving from Rybak's five-year infrastructure program. That helped the city to repave some 50 blocks downtown, and the resulting need to restripe those streets meant added bike lanes. More than half of downtown has been repaved in the last three years. That's raised the pavement condition index from 61 to 67 on a scale of 100, but that's still only in the middle of the "fair" range. Indeed, mere steps from the mayor's event there were big gulfs between concrete gutter panels adjoining hte newly paved travel lanes. The 2011 paving program included two other components, both more intensive than sealcoating. The city resurfaced almost 26 miles of street, using the more intensive mill-and-overlay technique in which a layer of paving is scraped off and then the street gets up to three inches of paving. That's cheaper than rebuilding a street but only lasts 10 to 15 years. Another .82-mile of street was reconstructed – or rebuilt from the dirt up – on Riverside Avenue. Rybak used the occasion to tout his latest proposal for paving, which averages $9 million per year in extra spending over the next five years. But a recent paving analysis by the Department of Public Works found that it will take 20 years of spending $14 million more than the city does now to keep streets from further deterioration. Rybak called his proposal "an enormous step" but acknowledged there's more more to be done.