The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet awarded $483 million of asphalt road paving contracts that only one company bid for in 2025, according to a free market think tank that wants more oversight of the state’s bidding process.
The new report from the Kentucky Forum for Rights, Economics & Education (KYFREE) found this amounted to a 79% increase from the $270 million of single-bid asphalt contracts the group previously identified in 2024.
Andrew McNeill, the president of KYFREE, said in a press release that the continued presence of single-bid road contracts inflates the price of projects and wastes taxpayer dollars.
“The Transportation Cabinet continues to be ‘all in’ on awarding asphalt single-bid contracts,” McNeill said. “It’s time to audit KYTC and put an end to this egregious waste of taxpayer resources.”
McNeill referenced House Bill 505, filed this year by GOP Rep. Kim Holloway of Mayfield, which would direct the state auditor to examine the contract procurement system of the cabinet’s Department of Highways every two years.
Under the bill, the asphalt contract audits would use statistical analysis to detect any potential bid rigging, collusion or schemes designed to circumvent a competitive bidding process.
Single-bid asphalt contracts have been scrutinized in Kentucky for decades, including a Courier Journal investigation in 1994 on “blacktop monopolies” that found county lines often served as an “iron curtain” for contract bids. The newspaper found a large majority of asphalt contracts in many counties had only one specific company bidding on that work, showing at least the appearance of collusion between companies to divvy up who bid where, and allow inflated bids.
Amid increased scrutiny in recent years, a legislative oversight committee in Frankfort released a report in 2024 that found a majority of asphalt-related contracts from 2018 to 2023 received only a single bid, a significantly higher percentage than neighboring states. Single-bid contracts were typically awarded at a higher cost relative to the cabinet engineer’s estimates, while those with multiple bidders were awarded at a lower cost.
Transportation Cabinet spokesperson Naitore Djigbenou responded to the KYFREE report with a statement saying the agency prioritizes competition and works to ensure the best value during each bidding process.
“To do so, our team of engineers, who are all bound by a code of professional ethics, develops an internal estimate that is not shared publicly to ensure more competition,” Djigbenou said. “They then compare bids and award projects based on the bid that is closest to the internal estimate.”
Djigbenou added that projects are commonly readvertised to encourage more competitive bids and they no longer post unit prices publicly if a bid is not awarded, as “spurring competition and reducing single-bid contracts has and continues to be our goal.”
The Transportation Cabinet also shared figures from the past decade showing an increase in rejected single-bid contracts. From 2016 through 2019, the cabinet rejected 47 contracts with a single bid, but that figure increased to 535 single bid rejections from 2020 to 2025. In that latter time frame, 63% of its awarded contracts had more than one bid.
The new report from KYFREE identified 199 single-bid asphalt contracts won by 16 different companies in 2025, with just seven of those companies winning 87% of the contracts.
McNeill stated that several of those companies piling up single-bid contracts are connected through subsidiaries or joint ventures. He noted that CRH-Oldcastle is the parent company of Mountain Enterprises and Hinkle Contracting and has a joint venture with Nally & Gibson (totaling $88.2 million of single-bid contracts), and the Lawson family owns L-M Asphalt Partners, the Allen Co., Walker Construction and Lexington Quarry ($222.9 million of single-bid contracts).
“The ‘iron law’ of Kentucky asphalt bidding persisted last year,” McNeill said. “Lawson-owned companies don’t bid into the CRH-Oldcastle counties and the CRH-Oldcastle companies don’t bid into the Lawson companies’ counties. And Kentuckians are worse off because of it.”
The asphalt paving companies have long denied that there is any collusion between them and argued that single bid contracts are inevitable based on supply and demand and where companies are located.
By far the largest single-bid asphalt contract in 2025 was a $147 million contract won by L-M Asphalt Partners to widen Interstate 75 near the Tennessee border in eastern Kentucky, as previously reported by Kentucky Public Radio. While the single-bid contract was enormous, the price tag was still significantly below the cabinet’s engineer estimate of $176 million.
Holloway’s HB 505 has been assigned to the House Transportation committee but has not yet received a committee hearing.
