Lexington company gets $424M in state contracts. Think tank says it’s a monopoly
The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet awarded $1.3 billion in paving-related projects that only had one company engaged in bidding during a recent three-year period, raising questions about how the state selects its contractors.
A Lexington-based construction company, L-M Asphalt Partners, secured $424 million worth of those contracts as the sole bidder between 2023 and 2025, according to an analysis by the Kentucky Forum for Rights, Economics & Education, an independent, free-market think tank. Roughly 33% of its contracts were for Fayette County projects where the company has dominated the market.
A 2020 study, the think tank said, asserts “stark evidence (exists) that county lines provide a focal point for collusive bidding,” or a coordinated effort by competitors to assign predetermined winners of contracts. The think tank cites it in raising questions of tacit collusion by the state’s asphalt industry, where competitors seem to agree to engage in the market in a specific way without explicitly saying so.
“This latest analysis is further evidence that L-M has an asphalt monopoly in Fayette County,” said KYFREE President and Senior Policy Fellow Andrew McNeill. “As a result, millions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money have been wasted while dangerous roads needing improvement have been neglected across the state.”
A call to L-M Asphalt Partners, which is part of ATS Construction, was forwarded to a voicemail inbox that was full Wednesday afternoon. Asphalt and other related construction companies have previously denied engaging in collusion, instead pointing the finger at the basic principles of supply and demand.
Single-bid contracting — where only one vendor submits a responsive offer on a work agreement — has the potential to inflate taxpayer costs since they lack competition. Without market pressure to drive prices down, bids can exceed the state’s own cost estimates, the think tank said.
The group has criticized the state’s use of single-bid contracting for decades, and legislative oversight committees in Frankfort have increased scrutiny in recent interim sessions.
A 2024 Legislative Oversight and Investigations Committee report said a majority of contracts signed from 2018 to 2023 only had one bid and were awarded at higher costs compared to those with multiple bidders.
Just a few years earlier, the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting found a third of road work contracts from 2018 to 2021 went to single bidders, costing taxpayers $9.6 million more than state estimates. When a state signs a road contract, the bill for the construction work is paid by the state from its tax revenues, tolls and fuel taxes, which is sometimes supplemented by federal funds.
This year, Rep. Kim Holloway, R-Mayfield, sponsored a bill that would have required a review of the state’s Department of Highways contract procurement system once every two years, though it never had a hearing or became law.
In a statement to the Herald-Leader, a spokesperson for the Transportation Cabinet said its engineers develop an internal estimate for a project that is not shared publicly to ensure more competition.
“They then compare bids and award projects based on the bid that is closest to the internal estimate,” spokesperson Naitore Djigbenou said. “It is also common to readvertise a project multiple times to encourage more competitive bids. To support this process, we also no longer publicly post unit prices when a contract is not awarded.”
From 2016 to 2019, the Transportation Cabinet rejected 47 single-bid contracts. And from 2020 to 2025, it rejected 535 single-bid contracts and awarded a total of 3,487 contracts during that time. Of those, 2,195 had multiple bids and 1,292 were single-bid awards.
The late owner of L-M Asphalt Partners, Leonard Lawson, was indicted in 2008 and acquitted in 2010 on antitrust charges when federal prosecutors said he was working with the Transportation Cabinet to rig bids in favor of his companies. Lawson’s family also own the Lexington Quarry, Walker Construction and The Allen Company. The trio won $106 million in single-bid contracts, increasing the share of awards from 33% to 40% between 2023 and 2025.
Potential contract award monopoly is not isolated to Fayette County or to L-M Asphalt Partners, the think tank’s analysis said.
Subsidiaries of CRH-Oldcastle — Mountain Enterprises and Hinkle Contracting — won nearly $280 million in single-bid jobs. Scotty’s Contracting, based in Bowling Green, won nearly $215 million in single-bid awards with jobs in Hopkins, Muhlenberg, Ohio, Simpson and Warren counties, the think tank said.
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