Paving work delayed as price of blacktop soars
Skyrocketing cost, shortages of asphalt force cutbacks in road paving projects across area
The cost of blacktop has area road pavers seeing red.
The price of asphalt, which is mixed with stone or gravel to form blacktop, has nearly doubled since the start of the year. That has translated into a near doubling of the price area pavers pay for blacktop.
For the first time that longtime buyers like Lancaster Highway Superintendent Richard L. Reese Jr. can remember, it also translated into a shortage of blacktop.
“I’ve been here 11 years, and there was never a problem with me calling up a day in advance and saying, ‘I need a ton of material,’ ” he said.
But for about three weeks last month and early this month, area suppliers rationed the amount provided to Reese and other blacktop buyers.
How much has blacktop gone up? Ken Del Prince, of Cheektowaga pavers Louis Del Prince and Sons, has a quick answer.
“At the start of the year, when we bid jobs in February, you were talking $41 a ton,” he said. “Now, you’re talking $70 a ton.”
Motorists can appreciate the reason for the increase. Like the gasoline that powers their cars, asphalt comes from crude oil, which has been subject to sharp increases in the past year.
As a result, cities and towns must make adjustments on the fly during Western New York’s relatively short paving season.
Reese and Hamburg Highway Superintendent Jim Connolly, for example, have had to postpone work they had hoped to tackle this year.
“We set up our program to do so many roads based on a particular cost,” Connolly said.
With the price of blacktop rising substantially since Connolly set up his program, “that means if you were doing 10 roads in your town, you’re only going to do five.”
That has happened in Lancaster, as well.
“I hate to admit it, but I’m going to cut back on paving some roads. I can let them go for another year,” Reese said. “I have one more road I’m doing, then I’m done for the year. There were four or five roads I was going to do, but those are being put on hold.”
The streets that won’t get done this year include Markey Avenue and Botimer and Summit streets.
“I did the worst roads I had at the time,” he said, mentioning Plum Creek Trail, Jenny Lane, Grace Way and Gale Drive. “They were starting to unravel a little bit.”
Buffalo took a similar approach, said Pete Merlow, city engineer.
“The first thing is to pave less streets,” he said of the price increases. “We do a little more rehabilitation work. Roads we originally scheduled for this year, we’ll have to put off for another year.”
Merlow said the city still was trying to determine which streets will have to wait.
In addition to, or instead of, postponing road repaving, some highway superintendents report doing other things to help keep their budgets in balance.
“I’m rearranging,” said Gerard J. Sentz, Erie County commissioner of public works. “I’ll do something less expensive. Maybe it won’t last as long, but I can still get the roads done I want to get done.”
Sentz said he has stretched his budget by doing more roads using a method called oil and chip: laying down a fresh bed of oil followed by fresh stone.
Another common repaving method, called mill and overlay, involves grinding up the pavement with large machines, then reapplying it, sometimes with fresh asphalt.
Later this month, Erie County will become the first Western New York locality to try a more environmentally friendly mill and overlay technique. Sentz said the new technique involves lower-temperature asphalt and “is supposed to be more ‘green.’ ”
In the Town of Tonawanda, Highway Superintendent Bradley A. Rowles said he has been taking on smaller sections of roads and relying on crack sealer.
“We go out the year after we pave, and we apply crack sealer,” he explained. “It extends the life of the pavement because the water isn’t getting into the pavement.”
Rowles also said he’s using a new kind of pavement. It’s more expensive but can cover more area.
“We can stretch the amount of linear feet we pave because we’re not putting it down as thick,“ he said. “It has more polymers for more expand-and-contract ability. I’ve had some very good success with those.”
The sharp rise in gasoline prices has exacerbated the problem for suppliers, according to John Werely, vice president for sales of Buffalo Crushed Stone, one of the area’s largest blacktop providers.
Crude oil is roughly divided into “light,” which is refined into such products as gasoline, jet fuel and home heating oil, and “heavy,” which is used for asphalt, he explained.
“The economics in refining is a very sophisticated business,” Werely said.
“Even though they’ve increased the cost of a ton of asphalt tremendously over the year, they’re still making more money on light ends. As a result, they’re making less asphalt than they historically would.”
