Boston Sand & Gravel recently completed installation of a new 110-kilowatt solar energy power plant. The plant is expected to supply 75 percent of the overall energy needed to power its maintenance facility in Charlestown. The system contains more than 500 solar panels and takes up approximately a half acre. “Boston Sand & Gravel is excited and pleased to complete our solar installation,” said Dean Boylan, the company president. “It is a cornerstone of our Green Plan through which we will support our customers with materials for green construction while reducing our energy consumption in the production of those materials.”

Nevada

A federal judge ordered a road-widening project on the Las Vegas Beltway to be halted pending a hearing on its bidding process. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Clark County commissioners selected Las Vegas Paving over Fisher Sand and Gravel Co., even though Fisher’s bid was $4.6 million lower. Fisher bid $112.2 million and Las Vegas Paving bid $116.8 million to improve the Beltway. Fisher Sand and Gravel contends that commissioners indulged in union bias and favoritism in awarding Las Vegas Paving the contract against the advice of their legal counsel. “We’ve alleged in the complaint that Clark County commissioners have contrived a reason to deny Fisher Sand and Gravel the bid,” Fisher’s attorney, Stanley Parry, told the newspaper.

North Carolina

Martin Marietta is seeking city and state approval for an upgrade of its Statesville plant, the Charlotte Observer reports. The local city council is expected to give its approval to the required rezoning. The approval would allow construction of several new buildings in the first portion of a two-part upgrade expected to cost $10 million to $15 million. “We need to build a new processing plant,” Martin Marietta Vice President Pax Badham said at the public hearing. “What we have up there now is obsolete. The plant we are proposing will produce more aggregate in less time, and it will be both quieter and cleaner than our current facility.”