WESTBROOK – The skyline along Warren Avenue is changing.
Looming behind the White Bros. office building is a large, green asphalt plant.
As Pike Industries fights to keep its quarrying operations open across town – a battle that began over opposition to an asphalt plant – the new addition to the White Bros. property went up without much fanfare.
Though the White Bros. asphalt plant makes a marked difference to the look of Warren Avenue, Mike White, the company’s president and former owner, said he hasn’t gotten any complaints or concerned phone calls from neighbors or passersby – just compliments from his industry colleagues.
The Westbrook Planning Board approved the plant last fall. A few months later, Connecticut-based Lane Construction purchased White Bros., a family-owned company for 55 years. In February, when the sale was finalized, Ken Anderson, who was the senior plant manager at Lane’s state headquarters in Bangor, relocated to Westbrook to oversee the new plant.
Lane already operates nine asphalt plants in central and northern Maine. The closest one to Westbrook is in Washington. A frequent contractor for state jobs in those areas, Lane’s projects include work on I-95 from Bangor to Midway, the rehabilitation of the Maine Air National Guard Airfield at Bangor International Airport, and the repaving of several roads on Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park.
According to Mark Latti, spokesman for the Department of Transportation, in the past year alone, the state has awarded 26 contracts to Lane for projects totaling $47 million. The role Pike plays in the southern part of the state is comparable to Lane’s further north, with 21 contracts totaling $35.8 million in the past year.
But equating what Pike would like to do on Spring Street to what White Bros. is about to do on Warren Avenue “is an apples-to-oranges comparison,” according to Keith Luke, Westbrook’s economic and community development director.
“This is really an extension of their business,” Luke said. “It’s an approved zone, and it means good paying jobs for people in southern Maine.”
According to Lane spokesman John Irvine, the company has more than 550 employees in Maine and plans to add between 20 and 25 employees to Westbrook’s current staff of 50, in order to run the asphalt plant operations.
The plant itself, which was transported from another Lane facility in Virginia, is mostly in place, but Anderson said the work that needs to be done before the plant starts running is only about 30 percent complete. There’s a new entrance being created just for the asphalt plant operations and more landscaping needs to be done, both along Warren Avenue and around the plant.
“It’s a work in progress right now,” said White.
Anderson and White said they expect the plant to start churning out asphalt in the late spring. The rock used to make the asphalt will come from White’s quarries on Methodist Road. The plant will be able to produce 300 tons of asphalt per hour. Anderson said that would bring in a couple hundred trucks a day, which would deliver the hot top to paving jobs in a 20-mile radius from the site.
“Contractors in the area are looking to work with us,” said Anderson, whom White called a “hot-top guru.”
White said he knew of Anderson before he came to Westbrook, just by being in the same industry in the same state, and said he has a great reputation and is well respected by the Department of Transportation.
“There’s a lot of science and a certain amount of art to it. Kenny’s got it figured out,” White said.
Paving is not completely foreign to White or his brother Tim, who are continuing to run the business under Lane’s name. Their father, who started White Bros. in 1955, once included paving as part of his operation. But still, under their management, the asphalt plant is an expansion of the business and its services.
“It’s a new adventure,” White said.
The new asphalt plant at White Bros. can produce 300 tons of hot top per hour. It should be in operation by late spring. (Staff photo by Leslie Bridgers)Send questions/comments to the editors.
