County asphalt bill passes

By Judith R. Tackett
The City Paper Online


County governments will soon be able to operate a facility to manufacture hot-mix asphalt after a proposal before the legislature passed in the House and the Senate Thursday.

Senate sponsor Mark Norris (R-Collierville) said some counties think the bill will help them cut their costs in half.

“They may or may not be correct in that,” Norris said, adding that’s why the bill includes a provision requiring counties to conduct a feasibility study.

Norris said some counties estimate they could produce asphalt and apply it for a cost of $25 per ton, while their current bids come in at $45-$65 per ton.

The bill will especially benefit rural counties because they often cannot solicit enough competitive bids on a project negotiate a lower price.

Davidson County is not affected by the law change because metropolitan governments were already excluded from a 1976 law prohibiting county governments from operating their own asphalt production companies, according to Rodney Carmical, executive director of the Tennessee County Highway Officials Association.

Memphis and three other county governments were also excluded from the 1976 law because they already operated asphalt-manufacturing facilities at that time.

The new law would require governments to submit a financial feasibility study for review to an oversight committee. The study would then have to be approved by a county’s government body.

Carmical said the feasibility studies made sense because the state does not have a real track record of government-operated, hot-mix asphalt production.

Similar attempts to reverse the 1976 law failed in previous years because of opposition from road builders opposed to government competition.

The Tennessee Road Builders Association agreed to this year’s proposal. Carmical said the new proposal was a good compromise between the parties involved.

Urban areas such as Davidson and surrounding counties would not be greatly impacted because their growth ensures those governments a wider array of companies bidding for contracts.

Construction of the county-operated, hot-mix asphalt facilities will probably not begin until after July 2006 because local governments are unlikely to include them in their upcoming fiscal budget, Carmical said.