Denver's Cost Savings Challenged

The role of government is to "serve and protect." That's why nearly every public agency needs a maintenance program and most are very good at what they do. However, there is a big difference between pothole patching and emergency repairs and using taxpayer dollars to compete unfairly against private industry for both asphalt production and placement activities while justifying your existence through the presentation of cost data and the need to have an army to plow snow in the winter.

For Asphalt Contractor magazine to be an advocate of asphalt "best practices" for the asphalt contractor, I would suggest that in the future you are more careful on promoting agency self-performance of asphalt services. That way you would avoid the disservice of doing what you did to the asphalt industry of Colorado with the June/July issue. That is, promoting a one-sided view on an issue where there is clearly a second viewpoint that went completely unreported. Maybe a follow-up article could be titled, "Denver Paving — The Mile High Concern" and explain why Denver is the only agency within a 300-mile radius that has its own asphalt plant.

Thomas Peterson, P.E., Executive Director, Colorado Asphalt Pavement Association (CAPA)
[CAPA represents the 12 million-ton asphalt industry of Colorado www.co-asphalt.com.]

Editor's note: Asphalt Contractor promotes the use of bituminous asphalt by reporting on production, placement and preservation issues.