Sandoval pressured IDOT over shingle use
Official aided donor in push for road material thought to spur cracks
In late 2014, then-state Sen. Martin Sandoval was angry with transportation officials.
One of his biggest campaign contributors, asphalt magnate Michael Vondra, had cornered the market on recycled roof shingles for use in road projects. But questions were mounting about whether the eco-friendly pavement material was causing roads to crack more quickly, and the Illinois Department of Transportation tightened the rules over its use.
Sandoval, the chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee, sent a threatening letter to the acting head of IDOT criticizing the move. The senator accused her of breaking the law, told her he’d haul her in for a public hearing and suggested he would request an ethics investigation.
“I regret to inform you of my loss of trust and confidence in your leadership,” Sandoval wrote
on his official letterhead in December 2014, CC’ing then-Gov. Pat Quinn and the executive inspector general. “Your actions and statements have demonstrated that you have chosen not to correct course in the agency.”
The letter, which the Tribune obtained through an open records request, was part of Sandoval’s longrunning effort to increase the use of recycled asphalt shingles. He also pushed legislation that could potentially help Vondra’s business and pressed IDOT officials behind the scenes to meet with his political patron.
Now federal authorities are interested in Sandoval’s involvement with the industry. During a raid of Sandoval’s Capitol office last fall, authorities sought records relating to Vondra, his associates and companies.
Sandoval’s involvement in the recycled asphalt shingle debate has received little attention, but his penchant for using power in Springfield to advance an industry no longer is secret.
Earlier this week, Sandoval pleaded guilty in federal court, with prosecutors outlining how he advanced the interests of SafeSpeed, a red-light camera company with business in many suburbs. In return for his services as SafeSpeed’s “protector” in the Illinois Senate, Sandoval took about $70,000 in bribes, according to his plea agreement.
The money, which was supplied by the government, was given to the senator by a SafeSpeed representative who was secretly cooperating with authorities, according to court records. SafeSpeed, which also had previously given Sandoval campaign contributions, has said the bribe payments were not authorized by anyone at the company.
He also admitted to taking another $180,000 in bribes from others “to benefit those people and their business interests,” though prosecutors declined to offer specifics as Sandoval continues to cooperate with a wide-ranging federal investigation into government corruption.
The Tribune found that Sandoval collected more than $50,000 in political contributions from firms tied to Vondra since 2010.
Sandoval and Vondra did not return multiple messages seeking comment. The shingle recycling firm Vondra founded, Southwind RAS, did not answer Tribune questions about the investigation. The firm defended its product and blamed cracking problems on other factors.
“Use of (recycled asphalt shingles) has reduced Illinois’ carbon footprint, saved taxpayer dollars and saved millions of cubic yards of waste landfill space,” the company said.
A rising industry
For decades, many Illinois roads have been resurfaced with a mix that included new asphalt and ground-up old pavement. In 2010, IDOT decided to allow recycled roof shingles into the asphalt mix.
That same year, Vondra formed Southwind RAS. The shingle recycling firm joined his array of construction-related companies built with the help of public contracts. By then, he’d become a prolific donor to politicians of both parties.
In 2011, state lawmakers passed a bill telling IDOT to “maximize the percentage of recycled asphalt roofing shingles” used in pavement mixes while maintaining quality.
IDOT records show the agency quickly expanded use of recycled shingles in the Chicago area. In 2013, IDOT’s contractors bought more than 12 times as many shingle grounds as they had had in 2011 — the vast majority in metro Chicago and supplied by Vondra’s company, state records show.
The material has been used in many major projects, including stretches of I-80, Butterfield Road and First Avenue, according to Southwind. The Illinois Tollway used it for parts of I-88, I-90, I-355 and I-294. Chicago used it on Michigan Avenue and elsewhere, including O’Hare International Airport for a base layer under concrete for runways, taxiways and access roads.
At the time, Vondra and son Matt were on a firstname basis with top IDOT officials, who invited the firm to discuss ways to change the special rules for using it, emails show. They discussed conferences to attend and travel arrangements, a promotional video for the Vondras’ firm and even a job candidate Michael Vondra was thinking about hiring, emails show.
As Vondra’s two dozen or so shingle recycling plants began sprouting across the state, Sandoval passed a 2013 measure that, in effect, helped stock them. The law forbid dumping shingles in any landfill within 25 miles of a shingle recycling operation. That same year, another law was passed to tighten up the rules on who could operate a shingle recycling facility. Sandoval sent to IDOT a proposal on how to enforce the law, which Vondra endorsed in a follow-up note to a top agency official, according to an email.
IDOT did not answer questions about the Vondras’ interactions with agency employees, nor did it respond to requests to see additional records, such as Sandoval’s proposal.
But records show IDOT soon began to sour on Vondra’s product.
Cracks emerge
By spring 2014, IDOT and federal officials had begun investigating “early cracking” in relatively new pavement projects that had used recycled asphalt shingles.
That July, the state transportation agency put out a memo saying “caution needs to be used” with recycled asphalt. Within months, the Federal Highway Administration issued a nationwide alert, saying they noticed problems in other states too. The agency ultimately threatened to withhold coveted federal funding for projects in Illinois if the state didn’t ease up on the material’s usage and figure out better ways to test it.
Vondra mounted a response. State emails show Vondra scrambled to get a former Illinois transportation secretary to set up a meeting with top agency officials. Vondra complained in an email that as a result of the federal pushback, contractors would need to come up with “all new mix designs $$$$.”
An industry trade group headquartered at Vondra’s firm commissioned a University of Illinois professor to do a study, which said the asphalt shingles material hadn’t caused the problems.
And Vondra’s industry group lobbied Congress, prompting four Illinois Democratic congressmen to criticize the federal crackdown and summon the top federal highway official to a meeting.
Vondra also had developed an ally in Springfield — Sandoval, the Senate transportation chairman. In addition to political contributions from companies tied to Vondra, a Vondra employee helped organize campaign fundraisers for Sandoval at a west suburban golf club, records show. Attendees with questions were directed to call the main phone number at a Vondra business, according to an invitation. Checks to Sandoval could be mailed to Vondra’s business address.
As the state was tightening the rules on the use of recycled shingle material, Sandoval wrote to IDOT’s acting secretary, Erica Borggren, in October 2014 and blasted the agency for “failing to use its best efforts” to follow the state law to boost shingle usage.
“Your department’s actions … will result in a loss of jobs and waste millions of dollars invested by the industries that have answered our call for greater sustainability in road construction,” he wrote.
Two months later, in the waning days of the Quinn administration, Sandoval threatened to hold hearings and file an ethics complaint after telling Borggren he’d lost “trust and confidence in your leadership.”
Borggren soon left the agency as a Republican governor took over. She declined to comment for this story.
Since then, IDOT and Vondra have continued to debate the rules for using the material. Records show that in late 2016, IDOT met with Vondra, at Sandoval’s behest. The agency agreed to some changes in the regulations, but not enough to satisfy Sandoval or Vondra, records show.
Vondra followed up with a letter to the head of IDOT that questioned “the intentions and the motivations” of rank-and-file engineers giving “disingenuous” information about the material as his industry was “constantly fighting the same bureaucratic battles to survive.”
An IDOT spokesman acknowledged Vondra has met with IDOT officials during the last decade.
“In general, Mr. Vondra expressed a desire for less stringent standards. None of those meetings or any other communication, however, resulted in any shift with IDOT’s underlying policy” on the use of recycled asphalt shingles, spokesman Guy Tridgell wrote in an email.
Roof shingles pile up
Even as late as last year, Sandoval pushed to increase the material’s usage in the $45 billion “Rebuild Illinois” infrastructure plan. But unlike early years, the effort failed. And, along the way, less of the material is ending up in state roads.
Companies that mixed asphalt already had concerns about the extra costs of using the ground-up roof shingles, and the 2014 federal admonition about the material was “the crack that exploded the dam,” said Kevin Burke, executive vice president of the Illinois Asphalt Pavement Association.
Since then, shingles have been piling up at Southwind RAS’ sites.
As of the end of 2017, the last record available, the company had amassed 420,000 tons. To put that in perspective, in all of 2018, IDOT used 27,000 tons of the material in road projects. Southwind RAS declined to say how many shingles remain today or who has responsibility for them.
Recently, another firm, Black Dog Petroleum, reached a deal with Vondra to buy shingles and sell them using the Southwind RAS name. Black Dog was named in a federal search warrant executed on Lyons’ village hall around the same time Sandoval’s office was raided in late September. An attorney for Black Dog declined comment.
The debate about the quality of pavement produced with shingles continues in Illinois.
IDOT and U. of I.’s Center for Transportation came up with a way to measure the likelihood of pavement cracking, and that test was used in a 2017 joint federalstate transportation study of roads that were less than three years old. The study found the projects that used the highest concentration of recycled shingles scored half as well as those using less or none at all.
Part of the study looked at nine stretches of road a year after they were repaved. The two with the most cracks were the only ones that had used recycled shingles: a stretch of 79th Street between Justice and Burbank, and a stretch of 159th Street from Cicero to Western avenues. They had more than triple the number of cracks as their closest competitor.
Separately, federal highway officials organized a national panel in 2016 to review the material’s use. The group concluded that if the material was to be mixed in, it should be used with certain limits — similar to what federal engineers had said previously when Illinois was ordered to cut back on its use.
The federal review was overseen by Jim Musselman, now a senior engineer at the National Center for Asphalt Technology at Auburn University. He told the Tribune he believed the review was spurred by “political pressure” from powerful interests in Illinois.
“I know they were swinging around a lot of clout,” he said.