Summit County is home ground: Akron itself and the ring of cities and townships around it. Below are the towns we work in, what a county built on a watershed divide and a string of glacial hills does to a driveway, and what each city actually requires when a job touches the street.
Akron, Cuyahoga Falls, Stow, Munroe Falls, Tallmadge, Hudson, Twinsburg, Fairlawn, Copley, Norton, Barberton and Green. Anywhere else inside the county line, send the address anyway; the answer is usually yes.
The name Akron comes from the Greek akros, a high point or summit. The city sits on the divide between the Lake Erie and Ohio River drainages. The Cuyahoga flows southwest out of Geauga County until it meets that divide in Akron, then turns sharply back north toward Cleveland, and the National Park Service notes that the ravines along its valley can drop nearly 600 feet within a few miles. The Ohio and Erie Canal was dug up to the Portage Summit here, reaching Akron from Cleveland in 1827, and the Portage Lakes were used to keep it supplied with water.
Ohio's geologists call the ground south of the city the Akron-Canton Interlobate Plateau: hummocky country between two old ice lobes, full of kames, kettles and bogs, sitting between 900 and 1,200 feet with a couple of hundred feet of relief. In plain terms, a great many Summit County driveways are on a slope, and a good few were built over a filled hollow.
Both show up in the asphalt. On a sloped drive the water runs to the bottom and stops there, so the lowest few feet are usually the softest. Over a filled hollow the base settles slowly into a shallow dish that holds meltwater. Neither is fixed by a coat of sealer, and the quote says so plainly when either is what is going on.
The National Weather Service normal for Akron-Canton Airport, on the 1991 to 2020 record, is 47.2 inches of snow a season. Every inch of it gets plowed and salted somewhere, and the chloride that runs off the street collects in the apron and the first few feet of the drive. That is why the street end of an Akron drive so often looks a decade older than the garage end, and why the crack filling there is the first thing done.
Akron's older neighbourhoods. The city's own records put its population at 69,067 in 1910 and 208,435 in 1920, drawn by the rubber plants. Firestone Park was founded to house and serve the Firestone factories, and Goodyear Heights is one of the city's historic districts. Housing from that boom sits on narrow lots, and many drives are a single car wide with a garage behind the house. Many have been patched and overlaid more than once, so the surface can be thicker in one place than another, and the edges crumble into the lawn.
The suburbs that followed. Stow became a city in 1960 with 12,194 residents, and its own financial report records more than 10,000 homes built there since 1970. When a whole street goes up in the same few years, its driveways age together and tend to fail in the same places: the joint at the garage slab, the seam at the apron, and the edge along the lawn where the snow gets thrown.
The older villages. Hudson traces its roots to the Connecticut Western Reserve. Wherever a drive sits under big old trees, there or anywhere else in the county, the coat cures more slowly in the shade, and leaf stain and sap need cleaning off first.
The drive apron, the curb and the public walk sit in the right-of-way, and in Summit County almost every city has its own permit, its own contractor rule, or both. What their published pages and fee schedules say:
Sealing and crack filling behind the sidewalk are not named as permit work in any of these rules. Where a city registers every contractor, as Norton and Twinsburg do, the job goes ahead only with a registered contractor, and in Twinsburg we check with the city before sealing a drive, because its zoning list says driveways without saying which work counts. Apron work goes ahead only under that city's permit and bond. Fees move most years, so the figure on your quote is the current one.
For a full replacement, yes: Akron asks for a Grading and Paving Permit, and a right-of-way permit if the apron is being redone. Sealing an existing drive is not listed.
Stow says adding on to an existing drive on your own property needs none. Changing the apron at the street does, at $60 plus a $100 bond that comes back after inspection.
Yes. It is worked from the bottom up so the wet edge is always being pushed into, and the soft area at the foot, if there is one, is patched first.
Driveway work in the township road right-of-way needs Copley's permit, and the township sets the material rules. That goes on the quote before anything is agreed.
Next door: Stark County to the south, from North Canton to Massillon.
