Joe Williams sat Wednesday at the board table during an Oktibbeha supervisors’ work session grappling with limited options — none of them particularly pleasant.

Original estimates to pave 11 miles of Oktoc Road in his district were about $1.8 million. The low bid was a little more than $2.3 million, leaving a half-million gap between the amount the county had budgeted and what was needed for the job.

Rejecting the bid and trying again would likely lead to an even higher price tag, as the prices of asphalt and other road building materials are rising fast with no signs of slowing.

“What if we do seven miles instead of all 11?” the District 5 supervisor asked.

But there were more problems.

The Mississippi Legislature, during the 2022 session, committed $1 million to the project to go along with contributions of just more than $400,000 each from the Mississippi Office of State Aid Road Construction and direct county funding. The legislation, as written, dictated all 11 miles must be paved and the money spent by the end of 2023.

Williams asked about changing the legislation, something board attorney and State Rep. Rob Roberson said is possible but difficult.

After mulling it over, Williams concluded that if the legislation couldn’t change, “We’ll just let them have the funds back.”

District 2 Supervisor Orlando Trainer, one of four supervisors at the work session, at first glared at Williams in disbelief. Then he moved to force Williams to pave all 11 miles and use funds from his county bond allocation — borrowed money backed by local taxes from which each supervisor has been given presumed discretion over $1.3 million for paving projects in their district — to cover the difference.

Williams fought back ferociously.

“This should be my decision because it is my district,” he yelled at Trainer. “… Don’t get into my business. Stay out of my district’s business. … There’s been a sense of jealousy from you ever since we got the $1 million (from the legislature) for that road.”

District 1’s John Montgomery calmly “implored” Williams to reconsider, noting that if the county gives that money back it would harm its chances of getting similar funds for roads in the future.

Trainer was more pointed.

“We’re not going to sit here and let you, as Joe Williams, do this crazy thing and jeopardize the county,” he said.

Trainer’s motion died after District 3 Supervisor Marvell Howard withdrew his second. Williams seemed to back off the idea of returning the legislative appropriation but never clearly expressed how he wanted to proceed.

The scene was extreme, Montgomery said after the meeting, but indicative of the decisions public officials across the Golden Triangle are being forced to make concerning road improvements.

Fuel and asphalt

Oktoc Road isn’t the only project where bids far exceeded estimates.

The low bid for improvements to five roads in Howard’s district came in at $2.2 million in March, almost double the $1.15 million County Engineer Clyde Pritchard estimated late last year for the project.

Using that bid as a template, Pritchard estimated road upgrades in Montgomery’s district — paving work on six roads and a subdivision — at about $1.8 million. The low bid opened this month was more than $2.4 million.

Neither of those is tied to legislation, so the work can be adjusted to fit the available funds. But the legislature also gave $1 million and State Aid $300,000 to improve Sturgis-Maben Road by the end of 2023. Pritchard said he’s “re-evaluating” his original $1.6 million estimate for that project.

“If you pulled numbers from projects we’ve helped the county with over the years, we’ve seldom missed an estimate,” Pritchard said. “Now we’re missing them by 30 or 40 percent.”

The price of asphalt, Pritchard said, is the primary culprit, jumping from $110 per ton late last year to $150 per ton and higher in the last few months. Cement, which Oktibbeha County uses to stabilize its roads, also is in short supply. When it is available, its price has jumped considerably.

Asphalt is tethered to the rising cost of fuel in several ways. It’s a petroleum-based product that is made in factories that run on petroleum, then it costs more fuel to ship and apply it.

Lowndes County also is feeling the strain.

It is completing work on a $5 million road plan, for which the bid was based on lower material costs last year. But recent bids for an additional $2 million road plan this year saw the same jump in asphalt — $150 per ton.

Road department director Mike Aldridge said that means the desired 17 miles in upgrades must either drop to 10.2 miles or the county will have to increase the budget.

“I guess we’re glad to lock that price in, but dang!” Lowndes board of supervisors president Trip Hairston told The Dispatch. “There’s going to be some real pressure to try to do it all, but I don’t know how we’re going to approach that.”

Value engineering

Phillips Contracting, a Columbus-based company founded in the 1950s, bids on as many as 150 jobs per year. This includes site development, utility, industrial, transportation, “basically anything related to dirt, concrete or asphalt work,” company president Blake Hill said.

This year alone, Hill said, Phillips has been the lowest bidder on $25 million worth of projects that weren’t awarded because its bid exceeded the project’s budget.

“We are trying to find ways to be more efficient, which will lower our production costs to try and keep our jobs affordable,” Hill said. “We are looking harder than ever … mainly at the aspect of lowering fuel consumption.”

Both Phillips and Burns Dirt Construction, a civil general contractor also based in Columbus, are dealing with long lead times on material availability, sometimes as long as six months.

On public projects, where their bids are locked in once they are accepted, they are estimating several months in advance what their actual costs will be once the work begins.

“You’re having to guess what you’re going to have to pay for material,” said Nic Parish, Burns Dirt Construction co-owner and vice president of operations and construction. “If costs continue to rise, bids will continue to increase.”

Even with the information they have, though, Parish said contractors can help engineers with better estimates.

“Engineers have historically looked at what bids have been for similar projects over the past year or two,” Parish said. “You can’t do that right now. If engineers are having good conversations with contractors to get a better idea of live pricing, they can get those projections more accurate.”

Both Burns and Phillips will help clients with “value engineering” once a bid is awarded. Basically, a public body accepts a bid, then sits down with the engineer and contractors to split it up or whittle it down. That way, the bid’s price per ton of asphalt, for example, is locked in, even if the work is scaled down after the fact.

Parish said Burns Dirt is handling only two public projects right now. The company is looking more at private developments — subdivisions, apartment complexes and retail projects — where pricing can be more fluid.

“You can negotiate prices with a private developer as you go, rather than be locked into a bid,” he said.

Economy of scale

A key, at least in Pritchard’s mind, to helping drive bid prices down is enlarging projects and bringing in more contractor competition.

Historically in Oktibbeha County, each district’s road projects are bid out separately. Those smaller projects are drawing a small number of bids, sometimes just one. If the county lumped all its road projects into one bid package, Pritchard said it might increase the bidder pool.

“So instead of 10 or 12 miles, you have contractors bidding on 50 miles,” he said. “More bidders means more competition. That’s going to be a gamble too, though, because you might end up with the same thing.”

Starkville is taking that tactic, according to Ward 2 Alderwoman and budget chairperson Sandra Sistrunk. The city just authorized borrowing $10 million in a series of bonds that will be repaid over the next decade with internet sales tax revenue. The first bond of $5 million will look citywide at “collector, arterial and minor” roads. It may be next year before that project is bid, which Sistrunk hopes will be enough time for prices to “start coming back to reality.”

Likewise, Columbus city engineer Kevin Stafford wants to speak with councilmen about how and when to tackle the city’s $3 million list of deferred paving.

“At old prices, you could estimate it would cost $15,000 per 500 feet of a city block and $150,000 per mile for a two-lane road, but now your money will only stretch about two-thirds as far,” Stafford said. “So we have to have the conversation. Do you want to wait? Do you want to have a larger project?”

Trainer, for his part, understands Pritchard’s position on packaging the county’s road projects in one. He’s just not sure the county has the capacity to supervise a large contractor on a multi-million dollar project. Also, he said he doesn’t want to cut out local contractors from the process.

“We want to give smaller guys an opportunity to participate,” Trainer said. “We have good local contractors who may not have the bonding or borrowing capacity for larger projects. … I think it’s worked better for us breaking (the projects) down.”

If there’s any light at the end of the tunnel for Pritchard, it comes from looking at the past.

“This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this,” he told supervisors at Wednesday’s work session. “Everything spiked in 2008, and in a year and half or two years, it started to come back down. I don’t have a crystal ball, but it has happened before.”

Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.