Government agencies and many corporations will see the end of their fiscal year about a month from now—Sept. 30. If you’ll indulge me for a moment, let me suggest something useful to you and, I’m admitting it, a bit self-serving.

If you’re one of the entities or companies with uncommitted funds that need to be used before the end of the fiscal year, I want to remind you of an evergreen online training course that you purchase once and have access to forever. AsphaltPro’s staff developed the back-to-basics Asphalt Paving 101 with industry paving consultant John Ball so you can train each new employee you bring into your agency or company without having to re-invent the wheel or re-purchase training materials.

Write off training expenses from 2023 with the one-time purchase of Asphalt Paving 101 but use the course for the life of your company as often as you need it. Check it out here and investigate a few of the free previews of lessons within the eight modules to get a feel for the content and style(s) of presentation.

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During a recent webinar, one of the presenters bemoaned the fact members of the pavement preservation community in his region sold a less-than-adequate treatment for a pavement system. The result was almost immediate reflective cracking and an unhappy owner who saw the asphalt industry as the problem.

In the long run, poor business practices hurt us all. The contractor—whose name I don’t need to know—may have made a quick dollar winning the bid to only seal a damaged pavement. But now he likely has a damaged reputation that won’t win the company any invitations to bid in the future.

Now consider the cost to the industry overall when this kind of poor business practice is happening. If a contractor is consistently underbidding the competition because he’s underselling what the customers need, he’s damaging the industry’s reputation as well.

The thought that came to mind was, “What happens when someone upsells the property owner and does more than the pavement needed? How greedy do we look?” There’s nothing wrong with going above and beyond for the owner. That’s good customer service in anyone’s book. But to go to a property manager and sell him or her a certain dollar amount of infrared patching prior to sealing with two or three coats when a parking lot only needed a few cracks routed and filled before one sealcoat, is to take advantage of people who don’t know any better. That’s not overperforming; that’s fleecing someone.

I’m not saying our industry fleeces customers. I’m saying we should be aware that property managers are watching their nickels and dimes just like the rest of us. The contractor who offers them real solutions to pavement problems with a plan of attack for this season and next will be the contractor who not only wins the job, but also wins the public relations game for all of us.

Why does that matter?

All ships rise with a rising tide.

If Contractor ABC shows the property manager of High-Quality Estates how to save a few nickels on long-term pavement maintenance plans, then that property manager will talk about Contractor ABC and the asphalt preservation options in positive, glowing terms at the next residential property managers luncheon. It’s better to have the manager of High-Quality Estates beaming about his good experience with the pavement preservation community doing a good job that was matched to his property’s needs than to have him grousing about a contractor taking advantage of him or doing a pricy sealcoating job without addressing the subbase failure in front of his display model office.

This sounds like basic common sense, doesn’t it? Yet it’s something a presenter was complaining about in 2023. We need to remember that a quick buck today could mean the loss of more than one contract tomorrow. Performing the right treatment for the right pavement at the right time applies to the smaller jobs just as it does for the larger, DOT-level projects. Assess what you can do for a property manager and give it to them straight. If that means you spend extra time educating them on a pavement condition index, so be it. If that means you lose the bid to someone else this year, you just might be the one the manager comes to in 2024 or 2025 requesting you bid to repair what didn’t get done properly in 2023.

Stay Safe out There,

Sandy Lender

Not all members of the paving crew are at the same experience level. During this week’s toolbox talk, introduce the new guys (or everyone) to the starter plate and why you need to know your fluff factor before you use it.

The starter plate does more than support the screed; it sets the height of your mat with fluff factor figured in. We’ve learned how to figure the fluff factor in these tips before, but I’ll put that equation at the bottom of this for folks who have joined us more recently.

The starter plate is, simply, a piece of metal that you place on the surface to be paved. The paver operator backs the tractor toward the plate(s); the screed operator lowers the screed to rest on the metal plate(s). This is the height from which you “start” paving.

If you don’t have starter plates, you’ll spend time building a starter pad—or starting point—with asphalt mix, shovels, rakes, lutes, and elbow grease. I’ll provide a link to an article that discusses how to “take off with stability” below.

Quick Tip:

To calculate the fluff factor, and assuming you’re paving with a smooth screed, add a quarter of an inch height for each inch of finished compacted mat.

2-inch compacted lift = 2.5 inches placed

1-inch compacted lift = 1.25 inches placed

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Colorbiotics more than doubled its recycling figures year-over-year as part of a focused sustainability effort at the company. Through the first half of 2023, Colorbiotics had recycled more than 1.8 million pounds of materials, compared with less than 750,000 pounds the previous year.

“Every product, every raw material that we have come in here, and every finished good that we get sent out is recycled,” said Mike Sams, the operations manager.

Plastics are the primary driver of the increase in recycling for Colorbiotics. HDPE plastic accounts for 425,000 pounds and polypropylene makes up 200,000 pounds of recycling in 2023. Reclaimed water is another significant growth area in the company’s recycling efforts. It accounted for a little more than 70,000 pounds in 2022 but spiked to 900,000 pounds in 2023.

“We produce products that go on landscapes, and our goal is to make the world a more beautiful place,” Sams said. “Part of that is to be a leader in the recycling and sustainability field.”

The Ames facility includes on-site intermediate bulk container (IBC) tote recycling for its colorant products. The company sends out about 28,000 IBCs annually, which can be returned and recycled.

Colorbiotics has set a goal to increase recycling another 20% by 2025. The ultimate objective is to become a zero-waste company.

Not all members of the paving crew are at the same experience level. During this week’s toolbox talk, introduce the new guys (or everyone) to the measuring wheel and the importance of figuring yield.

The measuring wheel is for more than lining out the paving job prior to haul truck arrival.

For example: If everyone on the crew knows how to figure yield and double-check it, you have a better chance of hitting your target each day. That means everyone on the crew should be able to grab the measuring wheel and walk the length of one haul truck’s pull. If you know how many tons the truck delivered and how far the paver placed it, you’ll be able to tell if you’re laying the lift a little thin or a little thick or if you’re hitting it just right.

This is a great

If everyone on the crew knows how to figure yield and double-check it, you have a better chance of hitting your target each day. That means everyone on the crew should be able to grab the measuring wheel and walk the length of one haul truck’s pull. If you know how many tons the truck delivered and how far the paver placed it, you’ll be able to tell if you’re laying the lift a little thin or a little thick or if you’re hitting it just right.

This is a great way to double-check automation, double-check deliveries, double-check best practices. Check out the article linked below for more information on figuring yield and giving your crew the best chance at getting a bonus-worthy job. (The article about Intercounty Paving gives solid examples of this along with their cheat sheet.)

QUICK TIP:

To figure yield, you want to know the width you’re paving, the length you’ve pulled, and the depth you’re supposed to be paving.

If the truck holds 20 tons and you ran out before you got to the “mark” you should have reached, you’re running too high and costing the company money. You’ll be calling for extra mix and an extra truck at the end of the shift if you don’t fix the problem.

Use these equations:

Width in feet X length in feet = A

Then A ÷ 9 = B

B X depth in feet = your tonnage

For example:

12 ft wide X 132 ft long / 9 = 176 X .1133 = 19.94 tons

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Associated Builders and Contractors issued the following statement in response to the U.S. Department of Labor today issuing a final rule, Updating the Davis-Bacon and Related Acts Regulations, which will make drastic revisions to the Davis-Bacon Act and Related Acts regulations that apply to federal and federally assisted construction projects funded by taxpayers.

ABC Vice President of Regulatory, Labor and State Affairs Ben Brubeck shared, “the DOL’s final rule disregards the feedback of ABC contractors, construction industry stakeholders and thousands of small businesses urging the withdrawal of this unnecessary, costly and burdensome regulation. Instead, the DOL is moving forward with dramatic changes to prevailing wage regulations, reversing much-needed reforms that were established nearly 40 years ago, and unlawfully increasing the regulatory burden on small businesses, new industries and public works projects.”

“With this final rule, the DOL has abandoned any possibility of instituting commonsense reforms to Davis-Bacon regulations to ensure accurate and prompt prevailing wage determinations while providing the regulated community with the clarity needed to deliver high-quality projects at an affordable cost to taxpayers,” said Brubeck. “Instead, the rule makes it much more likely that the DOL will adopt union wage scales at the prevailing wage at a greater frequency than in current practice, which already adopts union wage scales at improbable rates considering just 11.7% of the construction industry is unionized. ABC will now be forced to take appropriate legal action to address the numerous illegal provisions of the final rule and protect our members, and ultimately hard-working taxpayers, from the harmful impacts of this regulation.

“The final rule comes in the midst of challenging economic conditions facing the construction industry, including high materials costs and a skilled labor shortage of more than half a million in 2023,” said Brubeck. “The onerous new requirements and artificial inflation of construction costs imposed by this rule will only exacerbate these headwinds and undermine taxpayer investments in infrastructure.”

ABC submitted nearly 70 pages of comments on the DOL’s proposed rule, and its more than 50 significant changes, urging the DOL to withdraw the proposal.

The 1931 Davis-Bacon Act and related regulations require contractors and subcontractors that perform work on federal and federally funded construction projects of $2,000 or more to pay a government-determined prevailing wage and benefit rate on an hourly basis to on-site construction workers. According to the DOL rulemaking, the Davis-Bacon Act and 71 active Related Acts collectively apply to an estimated $217 billion in federal and federally assisted construction spending per year—about 63% of all government construction put in place—and provide government-determined wage rates for an estimated 1.2 million U.S. construction workers.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that repealing the 1930s-era Davis-Bacon Act would save the federal government $24.3 billion in spending between 2023 and 2032. A May 2022 study found that the Davis-Bacon Act costs taxpayers an extra $21 billion a year, increases the price tag of construction projects by at least 7.2% and inflates construction workforce wages by 20.2% compared to local market averages if the DOL calculated prevailing wages using modern and scientific methodology via the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.