Building Iowa roads for 75 years

NORTH LIBERTY — When he’s behind the wheel, Brett Finnegan keeps his eyes on the road.

“I can’t take a family vacation with my wife,” Finnegan said. “She says ‘You’re always at work, critiquing somebody else’s work.’ It’s like anything in our business. You pick up on things like that.”

It’s merely professional curiosity for Finnegan, president of North Liberty-based LL Pelling Co. He can find his company’s own handiwork along Highway 100 in Cedar Rapids and Interstates 380 and 80 in the Iowa City area.

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“Some of the first (interstate highways) in the ‘60s, those three areas remain today, and they haven’t had any patching,” Finnegan said. “They’ve been milled, ground off and resurfaced, about every 25 years, but they’ve never been completely rebuilt. Every square inch of concrete from the Mississippi River to the Missouri River has been completely removed and reconstructed.”

LL Pelling Co. observes its 75th anniversary this month, but its roots go back more than a century to the Williamsburg area, where founder and namesake Lloyd Pelling graded and oiled dirt roads for the county and townships as early as 1919, when he would have been in his early 20s.

‘Good Roads’

Iowa’s “Good Roads” movement was gaining momentum, propelled by Ford’s Model T, the industry’s first affordable mass-market vehicle. As the Model T’s list price dropped to a 1925 low of $260 — just over $3,900 in 2022 dollars — Ford built 15 million of the cars through 1927, fueling new motorists’ demands for all-weather, farm-to-market roads.

By 1921, only about 5 percent of Iowa’s roads were paved, according to the state Department of Transportation. In 1925, the Legislature passed a Primary Road Law to conform to federal law, allowing federal funding to improve U.S. highways across the state. The bill also authorized the state’s first gas tax, at 2 cents a gallon, to finance paving and maintenance.

”That’s where Lloyd Pelling got started, spraying oil, then putting the cover aggregate over the top of it to chip-seal roads,” Finnegan said. “It was really where they got started over in Iowa County and Johnson County, getting the farm-to-market roads and the farmers up out of the mud.”

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Pelling didn’t get around to incorporating his enterprise until 1948. Lloyd Pelling Jr. joined his father’s firm five years later and became its president in 1967. He retired in 1985, selling the family’s shares to Russell Rhinehart and his partners in Manatt’s Inc. of Brooklyn, Iowa, which became LL Pelling’s sole owner in 2019.

Lloyd Pelling Sr. died in May 1971, his son in October 2014.

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Family businesses

Through the changes in ownership and management, LL Pelling maintains family ties to the Williamsburg area.

“That’s where I’m from,” Finnegan said one recent morning. “My dad and a lot of the family, the ones that had been here for 50-some years, were from Williamsburg and Parnell area.” His father, Vince Finnegan, joined Pelling in the mid-1960s.

“My father had his own little trucking company,” Finnegan said, pointing out a framed photo on his office wall. “He did a lot of county rock hauling, and in about ’66 or ’64, Lloyd Pelling approached Dad and asked him to manage his truck fleet. That’s how Dad got into the business with them. He was looking over the truck fleet, and he was dragging us to work with him.”

“Us” were Finnegan and his brother Chuck, who joined the payroll, officially, in 1973, became partners with Manatt’s in 2000, and became Pelling’s president in 2003.

Brett Finnegan began working at Pelling in 1985 and succeeded Chuck as president in 2019 when Chuck retired. A third brother, Brian “Barney” Finnegan, joined the company in 1983 and oversees its trucking division today.

Paving science

Asphalt paving is a mixture of bitumen — a thick, heavy petroleum — and crushed stone to form the road surface. LL Pelling mixes pavement at plants in Iowa City, Cedar Rapids and Marion, to different recipes matching its application.

“If you’re doing a tennis court, it’s a softer oil, versus something you want to put out on the Interstate that’s got semis running on it every day, or an airport runway,” Finnegan said. “They’re different grades of oil.”

Pavement also varies by climate.

“There’s a little bit of science to it,” Finnegan said.

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Recycled materials are main ingredients. A subsidiary, Eastern Iowa Roofing, collects used shingles from landfills in Dubuque, Cedar Rapids and Iowa City.

“They collect them and grind them down,” Finnegan said. “We use it as a product in our asphalt because it’s got such a high asphalt content. We use that in our mix, and it reduces the amount of new oil we have to put into it.”

Another subsidiary, Valley Environmental Services, collects used motor oil, antifreeze and lubricants from car dealerships and oil-change shops that’s filtered and used to fire the mixing vats at its asphalt plants.

‘A skilled trade’

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The company has about 225 full-time employees during the April-November paving season, about 50 during the winter months.

“Our turnover, thankfully, has not been that great,” Finnegan said. “It’s been tough since COVID, like everybody finding new employees and keeping them, but we have a lot of people that are 15- to 25-year employees. They enjoy that seasonal work and three or four months off, doing what they do over the winter months.”

LL Pelling crews also apply lane striping, the finishing touch for roads and parking lots.

Complex paving equipment requires specialized skills, as does simply staying safe at a work site along a busy Interstate.

“As we bring a new employee in, they work side-by-side with a mentor on that crew,” Finnegan said. “They get taught the skills, whether it’s correct lifting operations, raking, operating the equipment. Places to be and where not to be on a job site. They go through six months of training before they get out of their orange vest and get a yellow vest. It’s a skilled trade.”

These days, “probably 70 percent of our work is county or DOT work,” Finnegan said.

Chip sealing vs. overlay

The company also paves and repairs streets for more than 180 municipalities throughout Eastern Iowa, placing more than 40 million loads of aggregate. Much of that work is chip sealing, a cheaper alternative for lightly traveled routes than a full asphalt overlay.

Chip sealing sprays a thin film of heated asphalt, followed by a layer of aggregate (“chips”), compacted to adhere to the surface. The technique protects the surface and improves traction, but many roads receive a full overlay as traffic increases.

“A lot of work comes out of that,” Finnegan said. “They’ll chip seal for 20 or 30 years and decide they want to do an asphalt overlay.”

Asphalt’s relatively quick paving process is an advantage when building or rebuilding highly traveled roads. Concrete pavement requires up to a week of curing before it’s ready for traffic.

“Usually, we’ll get out there about eight o’clock at night and get off at 6 a.m.,” Finnegan said. “If it can be done at night, a lane paved and reopened the next morning, it’s convenient for the traveling public.”

Finnegan said LL Pelling’s employee focus, a legacy of its namesake, is a big advantage for both customer and employees.

“Just keeping the same family vibe we’ve had here is key,” he said. “There’s a lot of family here, whether it’s blood family or the people we work with day in and day out. It’s a pretty tight-knit bunch.”

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