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NAPA/SAPA Annual Meetings Rewind

All the social media tweets and posts will tell you that the National Asphalt Pavement Association (NAPA) meeting was beautiful and inspiring, and it was. Thank you CalCIMA for allowing me to represent you, your businesses, and your interests on a national stage. The NAPA conference and subsequent meetings with other State Asphalt Pavement Associations (SAPAs) and industry members was a productive gathering for all of those involved. I wanted to write down and share tangible and thought provoking items from each of the days and some overarching themes and thoughts. 
 

We as SAPAs met and discussed many topics, covering safety, specification and policy development, material innovation, and recycling opportunities to bring more value to CalCIMA's membership companies both large and small. While this is an asphalt-centric program, most of our state and national partners don't shy away from the reality that aggregates and concrete are stakeholders and necessary partners in the construction industry's successful future. 

 

One of the most exciting presentations from our national partners was from Reed Ryan of the Asphalt Institute. Under his leadership, he is looking to update and expand the training programs available for the asphalt industry. I am already in discussions to bring some of their classes to us locally. In conjunction with the work that Buzz Powell of the Asphalt Pavement Alliance is doing, the future is bright in the realm of training and education. 

 

NAPA Annual  

General

 

The running theme of the entire week was, to no one's surprise, “Trump 2.0” and the sun-setting of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which expires September 2026. The latter seemingly more important than the change in administration. NAPA and every SAPA is keenly focused on FUNDING FUNDING FUNDING; we as an industry have approximately 18 months to educate our House and Senate allies on how important putting together a bill that is focused on highways, roads and bridges. 

 

The IIJA, while monumental, obviously had its flaws which led to the diverting of major funds that could have been used to bolster America's highway system. That is why NAPA is hyper focused on helping the government create a true “Highway Bill” versus an infrastructure bill. This language change in the communication of our industry's needs will be crucial in defining the goals we set for our elected officials. CalCIMA will be a strong advocate for moving in this direction with your help and guidance. Tariff ramifications, sustainable funding, innovation, “common sense,” and EVs paying their fair share were some of the additional discussion points.  

 

Workshops: Sustainability, RAP, CART, CEAP, Community Engagement, Trump 2.0, Advancing Asphalt Technologies

 


The program that NAPA put together was quite robust and I wish I could have cloned myself to attend all of the sessions. But thankfully NAPA provided nice picture recaps. My biggest takeaways were from the Advancing Asphalt Technologies and the Making High RAP sessions. 

 

The advancing asphalt technologies had speakers from companies that are all carving a path forward to meeting some of the needs that we don't even know that we have. It gave us a glimpse into what is possible but I found myself metering my excitement based on the making high RAP session. 

 

I have been in the industry for almost 20 years and I feel like we have been having the same conversation on RAP acceptance, the how to, the why, and needing to prove ourselves time and time again. While I don't have the answer today, the question still remains how do we move forward as an industry and what piece of this conversation are we missing. 

 

The Committee for Asphalt Research & Technology (CART) met and discussed the completion of quite a few long standing initiatives and the progress on some new ones. Most notably, NAPA completed some guidance on HMA mix temperature categories, updates on recycling agents, and stockpile management, and plastics and other supplementary. The committee is pouring time and effort into the feasibility of bio-binders and building out exciting new work groups covering automation and AI, evaluation of RAP without extraction, and other projects. All of these efforts will undoubtedly pay dividends in the future.  

 

Closing thoughts

 

While I could wax poetic about the time at the NAPA conference, I wanted to leave you with a couple final thoughts based on the keynote speakers Brad Montague, Josh Tinker and the Community Engagement sessions. We are a collection of hard working, resilient, and inventive people who love this industry and the people within. We will bring more people into this industry if, “we become the people that we needed for ourselves when we started in this industry.” Our work is imperative to America's success now and in the future, regardless of who is in office. What is essential, and what I believe will be the difference maker, is continued and deliberate engagement with and within the communities that we serve and live. Those things will create the path forward, and we will find a way if we maintain a childlike, not childish, thought process to experiment and be creative.
Cameron Richardson can be reached at crichardson@calcima.org.

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