MINOT — A national shortage of road-striping paint may mean some bare lanes for a few months.

The town finished repaving 4 miles Brighton Hill Road last month, covering the old stripes and center line with new asphalt.

Under normal circumstances, workers would try to get it re-striped in about a month, Town Manager Arlen Saunders said. But he doesn’t expect paint contractor Poirier Guide Lines of Massachusetts to have enough paint until August or later. The town was also forced to delay striping on another 30 miles of road.

“We would have liked to get some paint down on the roads earlier, but it looks like it’s going to have to wait,” Saunders said.

He said roads get more use during the summer, but winter is when the paint gets worn off.

“That’s why we try and get all of our striping done in the spring, when the new paint can make the biggest difference,” he said. “But not this year.”

Paint suppliers and road contractors nationally have been warning of a shortage of titanium dioxide, used to make reflective road stripes in yellow and white paint. Supplies of the material used to make acrylics are low, as well.

Those shortages have combined with greater demand from stimulus-funded road repair projects across the country to make the paint scarce.

“It’s not a pretty picture,” said Robin Lander, general manager of Franklin Paints of Massachusetts. “All we do is provide traffic paint, so this is hard. We’re doing what we can, trying to make sure our existing customers get their paint. But we’re not taking on anyone new.”

Robert King, owner of Poirier Guidelines, said his company is down to its last truckload of white paint. His company paints stripes and lines on many roads throughout New England, including Maine.

“We’re completely out of yellow,” he said. “I’m doing a project in Portland and I hoped I’d have yellow by the time we finished with the white, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen.”

He said his company had not received a supply of paint in four weeks.

“Work is starting to back up,” he said. “Like in Minot, I told them I’d be up as soon as I get some paint, but I don’t know when that will be.”

Mark Latti, spokesman for the Maine Department of Transportation, said shortages forced the state to reorganize its scheduled painting projects.

“We went in and focused on our heaviest-used roads first, making sure they were taken care of,” Latti said.

The MDOT normally repaints all lines and markings on interstate highways and on more than 8,400 miles of state-maintained roads. Fog lines, the white lines painted along the sides of roads, are usually painted every other year.

“In the past, we go region by region,” Latti said. “We just saturate the area with multiple trucks and paint every road, and then we move on.”

This year, paint crews focused on Interstate 95 first and then on roads that were being paved or reconstructed. They then painted busy roads that have the most traffic, Latti said. Rural roads may not get repainted this year.

The shortage shouldn’t be a problem for the Maine Turnpike. Dan Paradee, spokesman for the Maine Turnpike Authority, said it was able to stockpile enough paint to get through the season.

“The bottom line is we have enough to last at this stage,” he said. The turnpike authority bought 12,550 gallons of white paint and 7,250 gallons of yellow this spring. It’s stored in maintenance facilities along the 109-mile turnpike.

Altogether, the turnpike has 660 miles of painted lines that are regularly repainted or touched up.

The authority paid $3,000 more for road paint in 2010 than it did the previous year, Paradee said.

“But that’s more likely attributable to normal price increases than anything related to a shortage,” he said.

Steve Murch, with the Lewiston Public Works Department, said the city paid an additional $600 this year for road paint.

“But we have all the material we need to do what we need to do,” Murch said. The city bought most of its paint before the shortage began.

staylor@sunjournal.com

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