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KPI-JCI

Jack Porter had a better idea. As a fourteen-year veteran County Commissioner for Grady County, OK, he is responsible for all the road maintenance and repairs in District Three. With roughly 515 miles of blacktop to manage, the volume of asphalt consumed by just his one district (the County has three) is quite considerable. But the rising costs of petroleum, for both the road oil that goes in the asphalt mix and the fuel burned in the transportation to deliver a load, saw Porter's budget getting blown in no time. So he found a way to make his own, and will save the County hundreds of thousands of dollars by doing so.

Grady County is located in oil country, and while Porter's district may not have a huge population of people, it definitely has a large population of trucks. With a landfill in the district, three refineries and an oil disposal well, the roads take a beating. "Last year, we had three major floods too, so that didn't help the roads either." All that pressure adds up to plenty of road repairs, which, among all his other responsibilities to the County, keep Porter plenty busy.

The 1,200 square-mile County in central Oklahoma has always dealt with road repairs as just that - a repair. "We had chip sealed our roads for years and years," Porter explains. "But we wanted to take it up a notch and start doing overlays. Since the trucking and cost of blacktop in our area made that cost-prohibitive, we began exploring a way we could afford to make our own."

One would think that such a search would inspire 'solution-oriented' dealers to step up and help find an option that would make that idea a reality. But Porter admits that really wasn't the case. Jim Harmon from The G.W. Van Keppel Company's Oklahoma City branch was the exception. "He showed an interest in wanting to help us solve our problem right away," Porter explains. "Jim sat down with us to better understand how we wanted this to work, and pointed us to the KPI-JCI pugmill plant. Obviously, the pugmill is core to the process of creating that blacktop, so that's where we began to build our process."