The publicly funded highway market makes up about 60% of the market share in Utah. (The rest of the industry’s markets are the airfield, residential and commercial markets.) Federal-aid highway funding makes up almost half of Utah’s annual state DOT capital outlays for highways and bridge projects. As a result, Congress does not enact any bills more important to the asphalt pavement industry than multiyear surface transportation reauthorization bills. The bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) bill, signed into law Nov. 15, 2021, by President Joe Biden, authorizes exactly that. IIJA will deliver badly needed funding to repair and rebuild Utah’s roads and bridges over the next five years. It will also unleash a demand for asphalt pavement not seen since the start of the Federal-aid Highway System in the 1950s. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) negotiated the bill with his colleagues and was the sole member of the Utah congressional delegation to support the legislation. After President Biden signed the bill into law, Senator Romney wrote a press release that said IIJA “will help Utah expand and build roads, mitigate drought conditions, fulfill critical water needs, and prepare for and respond to wildfires without raising taxes or increasing inflation.” As the senator’s press release indicated, IIJA is more than a surface transportation reauthorization bill. It is also an infrastructure bill dealing with roads, bridges, airports, water, and broadband. Nevertheless, the legislation will provide the largest federal highway formula funds investment for Utah. They will total $2.6 billion over five years. That is about 33% more than the state’s federal-aid highway formula funds under the previous law, the FAST Act. The National Asphalt Pavement Association led the industry’s advocacy campaign, and a white paper called Build Back Better with Asphalt provided talking points during meetings with members of Congress and congressional staff. Together, NAPA’s government affairs team, state asphalt pavement associations, and industry members educated decisionmakers, who learned asphalt pavement is a sustainable, economical and high-performing material critical to the economy and U.S. jobs. In fact, NAPA’s lobbying efforts were detailed in a feature story in The New York Times, summing up NAPA’s lobbying for infrastructure dollars as the most successful of any interest group. From an asphalt industry perspective, IIJA is important for what it does and doesn’t include. First, the legislation provides five years of both funding and policy certainty. On the funding side, UDOT will be able to plan and budget for highway projects over five years. They know what their funding allocation will be from the federal government on an annual basis. On the policy side, there is no question that reducing carbon emissions from construction materials, including asphalt pavements, will be important for the asphalt pavement industry to realize all the opportunities afforded by the legislation. IIJA also includes $6 million annually to deploy innovative pavement technologies that are ready to go in the marketplace but are not fully implemented yet. There is also another program where UDOT would be able to get a 100% payable share for a highway project if they set up a contingency fund to address work zone safety issues not identified at bid time. Pavement-type selection or pavement design mandates, such as requirements for life-cycle cost analysis, alternate bids, and plastic in asphalt, are not included in the legislation. Also, NAPA successfully secured an exemption for liquid asphalt, polymers, and additives from IIJA’s Buy America requirements. Without IIJA also includes $6 million annually to deploy innovative pavement technologies that are ready to go in the marketplace but are not fully implemented yet. There is also another program where UDOT would be able to get a 100% payable share for a highway project if they set up a contingency fund to address work zone safety issues not identified at bid time. Continued on page 32 31
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