Oil Prices Driving Up the Cost of Asphalt

By Katie Ahern on Monday, June 30, 2008.

Communities across the state are feeling the impact of the high cost of oil these days. It now costs more to heat town hall and to fuel city garbage trucks.

Asphalt is also a petroleum product and towns are facing double digit increases in the cost of paving our roads. As a result, towns across New Hampshire are cutting back up to 30 percent of their road repair projects this summer.

NHPR’s Katie Ahern has the story.

“Construction noise”

City Workers operate heavy machinery as they pave a block of Orange St in Manchester.
One machine is spraying a coat of black oily liquid called the tack coat and prepares the road for a layer of asphalt.
Down the block, the steamroller waits for its turn to make Orange Street once again ready for traffic.
Manchester Highway Department Superintendant Bob Roy says this job has become a lot more expensive.

[ bobroy.wav ] “4 years ago we were doing approximately 5 miles of resurfacing This year with the same funding we’re down to a mile of resurfacing, so obviously there’s a big difference and distance in the streets that we can do.”
(face SFX under and out)
Manchester isn’t the only city feeling the strain.
New Hampshire Department of Transportation spokesman Bill Boynton says asphalt is so expensive the state might be able to complete only 70 percent of the repaving projects they had hoped to do this year.
The remaining 30 percent will get pushed back to next year or cancelled altogether.
[ boyntonbudget.wav ] “Our resurfacing budget is approximately 42 million dollars and that was to go to paving approximately 300 miles of New Hampshire state maintained highways so we’re going to try to do as much of that as we can but how much is uncertain at this point.”
Luke Powell, assistant director of Public Works in Laconia says that increasing asphalt prices have hurt them too.

[ laconiahwy.wav ] We’re working under a tax cap. The council works very hard to set a budget, and we work very hard to live within that budget. We’re just not able to get as much done with the funds allocated as we were a year or even 2 years ago.”
He hopes to get as many projects done this year as he can, but as of now he’s not sure how many that might be.
The price of asphalt is skyrocketing.
In the past year, it’s seen a record 15 percent increase.
One of the reasons for the higher cost is that one of the components of asphalt, a petroleum based binder, has more than doubled in price over the past two years.
As dire as this may seem for the local road agents budget, things could be worse.
Most components of road resurfacing can and are regularly recycled and that keeps costs lower..
Mark Lennon is one of the directors of the Institutional Recycling Network.
His company recycles all construction waste including asphalt.

[ marklennonrec.wav ] “Asphalt is essentially a hundred percent recycled now when you see a road being ground up for a new layer of asphalt you can be sure that just about 100 percent of what’s coming up is going back into new asphalt.
New Hampshire requires contractors use a certain percentage of recycled asphalt aggregate on every road project.
But the one component of asphalt that cannot be recycled is the one that costs the most.
Officials at the DOT don’t see much relief on the horizon.

They’re comfortable with asphalt’s performance and have not found a comparable alternative for road surfaces.

For NHPR News , I’m Katie Ahern in Concord.