The Longmont Leader received a letter to the editor from Erik Estrada, Cemex Lyons Cement Plant Manager concerning its employees:
As plant manager for the Cemex Lyons cement plant, and as a 20-year veteran of the North American cement industry, I want to share a personal perspective on our plant, processes and people that is missing from current discussions about our operating status.
It’s easy to forget that a modern manufacturing plant is more than buildings, pipes and storage silos for materials. It’s also people. I fear our more than 100 Cemex employees at the plant and their families are being forgotten, or worse, consciously disregarded in the effort to force us to shut down.
Our employees and their families live throughout Boulder County, including in Longmont, as well as in Weld and Larimer counties. Many employees are represented by the International Union of Operating Engineers. All our employees take pride in their work and enjoy highly competitive wage and benefits packages which would be difficult or impossible to replace.
Many of our employees happen to be Latino, as often is the case in skilled building-related and construction trades in Colorado. It’s hard to accept that a county which claims to care about creating economic opportunity for Latinos appears so willing to put local Latino families out of work.
No one cares more about safety than me and our employees. Safety is a key priority for Cemex, which includes traffic safety on Hwy. 66 outside our plant. Employees and their families drive this highway every day coming to and from shifts at the plant, taking children to school, shopping at local stores in Lyons or Longmont, or going to church. We have used trucks to support our operations since the earliest days of the plant and have continued to do so safely since our request to maintain the Dowe Flats quarry was declined by Boulder County.
Our team at the Cemex Lyons plant makes a high-quality product that is one of the foundational building materials for modern life. Cement is a key component in concrete, the most used material on earth after water. The roads we drive on, the sidewalks we walk on and the foundations for homes, hospitals, schools and infrastructure are made of concrete, which requires cement for strength and durability.
Cement produced by our team has been used for projects including the I-25 and Denver International Airport expansions and for street paving and other infrastructure work in the Town of Lyons and beyond. Through its contractors, Boulder County itself is a major purchaser of concrete and cement for essential infrastructure projects.
As the county works to address its severe housing shortage, concrete to pour the foundations for homes, condominiums and apartment buildings – with cement as a key component – will become more necessary in Boulder County, not less. With housing costs in the Denver area already painfully high, making building materials more scarce and costly is not the right solution.
Manufacturing cement, like manufacturing for almost all materials essential for modern life, has an environmental impact that we work hard to mitigate. Most of the cement made at our Lyons plant is Portland limestone cement, which has lower carbon intensity than conventional cement.
Those who have called for the Lyons plant to be shut down and for our employees to be thrown out of work say that cement can come from plants in other places and our employees can find other jobs. But bringing cement to Northern Colorado from long distances has an environmental impact, too, since there will be more transportation-related emissions, and forcing our employees to leave skilled jobs has a social impact.
Boulder County is wealthy, with among the highest household incomes in Colorado. If the Cemex Lyons plant is shut down, wealthy Boulder County will be “offshoring” the production of cement used locally to other places.
Cemex plans to work through the process with Boulder County. Our goal is to continue providing a high-quality construction product safely and high-quality jobs for our employees. They must not be forgotten as part of this discussion.
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