In the midst of negotiations over the infrastructure bill last year, while the pandemic still limited face-to-face meetings, lobbyist Martin T. Whitmer Jr. a creative way to reach lawmakers with a message from his client, the asphalt industry: He took out a pair of folding lawn chairs from his suitcase and invited lawmakers to meet him in a park near the Capitol.
“You just have to have some things face to face, and that really, really helped,” said Mr Whitmer.
The strategy seems to be paying off. Within the $1 trillion in spending allowed by infrastructure legislation President Biden signed in November, the asphalt industry could eventually get the bulk. And while roads have probably always been a major focus of legislation, the lobbying effort provided an opportunity for the industry to promote what it termed as its environmental awareness, making its funding more attractive to lawmakers concerned about road construction fueling climate change. .
The infrastructure package will allocate at least $350 billion to highways and bridges over five years, according to the Eno Center for Transportation, a nonprofit transportation think tank in Washington, compared to about $91 billion for mass transit. An additional $19 billion to the Transportation Department to fund major projects, such as submerged vehicle tunnels or bridge replacement, could increase paving spending.
The highway and bridge budget will pay the engineers, steel, concrete and other elements of the structures. But lobbyists and transportation experts expect too much of paving spending goes on asphalt, the material that covers 94 percent of U.S. roads and bridges (the other 6 percent are paved with concrete).
According to lobbyists, congressmen and other people involved in the process, the asphalt industry’s funding gains appear to have resulted from the legislative prioritization of meat and potatoes aided by politically prescient pressure by trade groups. Lawmakers realized that in a polarized political environment, they could find common ground in repairing roads and bridges. Proponents of asphalt, hoping to counter the idea that asphalt harms the environment, labeled the material an unlikely ally in the fight against climate change.
“We are America’s No. 1 most recycled product,” said Jay Hansen, executive vice president for advocacy at the National Asphalt Pavement Association, the industry’s leading trade group. A 21-page letter the association sent to Mr. Biden’s transition team in late 2020, titled “Build Better With Asphalt,” suggested that asphalt was also critical to job creation and economic recovery.
The first wave of funding under the infrastructure plan, which targeted a number of areas such as broadband, energy programs and water services, was provided shortly after the bill was signed. The next wave, which includes tens of billions of dollars for highways and bridges, is expected to be released when Congress approves a 2022 spending package, possibly next month. That funding will be distributed to cities and states, who will combine it with their own financing of fuel taxes and other fees for construction projects, including paving.
There are already controversies about how to spend the money. A December memo from the Federal Highway Administration that prioritized improving existing roads over building new ones — a proposal that transportation executives saw as an effort to curb the environmental impact of new construction — sparked protests from some state transport officials, who said the guidance is undermining them.
In a letter to Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg on Friday, more than two dozen Republican senators — including Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, and West Virginia’s Shelley Moore Capito, the senior Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee — argued that the proposal memo was contrary to Congress’ intent to pass the bill. The senators asked Mr. Buttigieg to withdraw or revise the memo to better reflect the spirit of the law.
At the same time, an attempt by Senate Democrats to suspend the federal fuel tax to curb rising consumer prices met immediate resistance from the transportation industry. An industrial trade group said in a letter to Senate leaders that even a temporary curtailment of taxes threatened to unravel the infrastructure package.
Despite ongoing political squabbles, asphalt manufacturers say they are excited about the prospect of five years of financing security, allowing them to rent and expand.
“We have the capacity to do more work,” said Dan Garcia, president of CW Matthews asphalt manufacturer, based in Marietta, Georgia. “So from an equipment capacity, a factory capacity, it will be really good for us.”
The company of Mr. Garcia operates 27 asphalt plants across Georgia, crushing rocks mined at nearby quarries, combining them with sand and gravel into a mixture known as “aggregate,” and boiling them with asphalt, a viscous liquid derived from raw materials. oil. The asphalt mixture is then loaded onto 18-ton trucks that transport the mixture to the construction sites.
With a projected funding increase of as much as 20 percent at the Georgia state transportation division, CW Matthews’ largest customer, Mr. Garcia now adds more than 100 employees to its 1,300-person team.
Paving groups urged the government to come up with more permanent funding for roads well before Biden was elected. The last major financing package, the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act, or FAST Act, was signed in 2015 by President Barack Obama. Mr Trump’s administration presented a plan of its own, but a series of “infrastructure weeks” that led to little progress eventually became a running joke. By 2020, the pandemic had overtaken most other priorities.
The Infrastructure Act at a glance
In December 2020, shortly after Mr. Biden, the National Asphalt Pavement Association sent its “Better Building Back With Asphalt” letter to the president-elect. The arguments about the need to finance new roads and bridges were not new, but the positioning of asphalt as an environmentally friendly material was.
Mr. Whitmer, who knew some of the transportation advisers on the presidential transition team, recalls being encouraged by the response. “They didn’t know that asphalt is the most recycled product,” he said, the consultants told him in back-channel discussions.
However, the overall environmental impact of asphalt is less rosy. New roads intended to reduce traffic congestion in the city simply involve more motorists, contributing to CO2 emissions. Recycling a wider variety of materials in asphalt, such as soil, used tires or soybean oil, and cooking asphalt components at a lower temperature to reduce emissions are promising practices, but have yet to be widely adopted.
The factories of Mr. Garcia still manufacture the relatively warmer “hot mix” asphalt pavement, and usually have between 20 and 40 percent recycled asphalt pavement in their new materials – more than the standard American road contains.
Asphalt itself is a polluting hydrocarbon. And a recent study by Yale University engineers suggested that asphalt pollutes the air when exposed to bright sunlight. (The Asphalt Association questioned some of the Yale study’s conclusions, saying that “asphalt materials from in-use sidewalks are not significant sources of urban smog.”)
Last April, after Mr Biden unveiled a job plan that prioritized rebuilding roads and bridges, transportation groups began to coordinate more closely. The mindset, said Jeff Davis, a senior fellow at the Eno Center, was “a rising tide lifts all boats.” He added: “They all agreed that more money would help everyone.”
To give the lobby a more tangible quality, Vulcan Materials, the nation’s largest producer of construction aggregate, brought Representative Carolyn Bourdeaux, a Democrat of Georgia, to its Norcross quarry in that state, and Senator Bill Hagerty, Republican from Tennessee. — who had put himself through college, partly by shoveling a tarmac lane — to explore the Nashville quarry.
In Washington, Mr. Whitmer pulled his seats out of the trunk and began calling members of Congress for coffee in the park. During video calls, Mr. Hansen showed 2 inch squares of solid asphalt mix. “You use this every day, but you don’t realize it,” he would say.
Last April, when the White House and some lawmakers began defining infrastructure in a broad sense, some industry leaders and lobbyists worried that money that had gone to highways in the past was being shared with projects such as federally subsidized housing. An industry suggestion to raise federal fuel taxes to help pay for new spending was rejected by Senate leaders. The whole process was tainted by the partisan polarization in Congress.
But the issue proved of sufficient importance to enough members of both sides that a bipartisan deal was created that brought in significant new money for needs such as public transport and better access to broadband and roads.
“It’s good to get both parties together to agree on something. I wish we’d see that more often,” said Mr. Garcia over the noise of truck equipment on a recent morning in Adairsville, Georgia as his crew laid tarmac along Route 140. “It doesn’t just affect us – these truck drivers, the quarry – but this is clearly progress, isn’t it?”
