A Message from ARRA President, Jason Wielinski

Dear ARRA Members and Industry Partners

The Annual AEMA-ARRA-ISSA meeting in Palm Harbor, Florida was another successful, engaging meeting of our PPRA organizations and it was great to visit with ARRA members in attendance.  It certainly was refreshing to have excellent weather for the duration of the meeting (for a change).  The meeting content was excellent.  Kudos to the Annual Meeting Planning Committee, especially Bryan Ray (ARRA’s rep on the committee) for developing an engaging lineup of topics.  We heard a great keynote presentation from Dr. Ivan Joseph, an interesting perspective on supply chain economics, and an excellent agency example on implementing pavement preservation across the road network in Polk County, Florida.  We then heard very informative and timely updates from our industry partners at FHWA, the Asphalt Institute, NCAT, FP2 and AMAP.

ARRA’s Technical Session was equally excellent.  First, Mike Hemsley and Bill Evans from Ergon shared a story on using a new approach to reconstruct a road built with fly ash using FDR techniques.  We were able to learn about challenges and successes of performing CIR on a pavement in Yellowstone National Park from Mike Concannon with Pavement Recycling Systems and Alex Machupa and Nassim Sabahfar with Western Federal Lands.  Matthew Teto from Indus shared lessons and opportunities with paver laid FDR and finally we heard from Blair Heptig with Kansas DOT and learned about their experience with Hot In-place Recycling. I encourage all members to take advantage of the member benefit to download and review the presentations as they became available.

We celebrated several projects and individual with awards in Palm Harbor.  ARRA is very excited to see awards presented to agencies from Roads and Bridges magazine.  The New Mexico DOT was recognized with an award for a project using Cold In-place Recycling and another project that used Full Depth Reclamation.  The City of Littleton, Colorado was recognized for their HIR project.  I encourage everyone to read about these great projects in Roads and Bridges magazine.  ARRA celebrated three very worthy individual award winners: Mr. Kit Black with the Texas Department of Transportation for Excellence in Full Depth Reclamation; Mr. Scott Meinders with Winnebago County, Iowa for Excellence in Hot In-place Recycling and Mr. John Fox with Caltrans for the Charles R. Valentine Award for Excellence in Cold Recycling.

Looking ahead in 2024, we are all very excited for our upcoming Pavement Recycling Summit in Reno, Nevada October 21-24, 2024.  This year’s meeting will be another excellent opportunity to connect, collaborate, learn from others, and hear how user agencies are implementing our pavement recycling technologies in their networks.  We are very excited to share that we are working with the Rocky Mountain Asphalt User Producer Group to increase exposure and promote attendance of their membership to our meeting.

On a final note, we are currently engaged in our Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) project with our sustainability consultant, WAP.  As we are beginning to plan our early season projects, on behalf of our Sustainability Committee, please consider and prepare to submit data for our LCA project.  We need additional project data representing all of our disciplines, but we are especially in need for data form FDR and CCPR projects.  Please reach out to me, Rick Church or John Rathbun (Sustainability Committee Chair) to learn how you can get involved and provide information.

Our Board is also meeting this summer to update ARRA’s strategic plan.  This exercise will help us identify goals and develop a strategy to guide ARRA and prioritize initiatives over the next few years.  Please feel free to contact me if you have any ideas or suggestions to advance and improve our organization. I can be reached at jwielinski@asphaltinstitute.org.

I hope we all have a successful and safe construction season!

Jason Wielinski, P.E.
ARRA President