“I have [employees] just sitting here, waiting for a load” to deliver, says Paul Gott of Gotts Transit Mix, a small Milan-based supplier of concrete to contractors in Ann Arbor and elsewhere. As we spoke, Gott was sending out a truck for a sidewalk job at Main and Liberty–but he says his concrete sales were half what they normally would have been in October, because he’s having to turn down jobs for lack of cement.

“There is a shortage, not of concrete itself, but of cement,” says John Ciulis, the project manager for Ann Arbor developer Dan Ketelaar’s six-story apartment building going up at 618 S. Main, where Fox Tent & Awning used to be. Cement is the binder that turns sand and gravel into concrete, and concrete is the foundation–literally–of most construction.

“The shortage is an industry shortage,” says Steve Gallagher of Ontario’s St. Marys Cement Group, one of two major suppliers to southeast Michigan (the other is LaFarge, a French multinational with a distribution center in Detroit–they’re Paul Gott’s source). Gallagher says the problem isn’t making cement but getting it where it’s needed. In Michigan, it’s usually shipped by water, but “the harsh winter that we had [last year] basically locked up the lakes much longer than normal … We’re all hoping this was a once-in-a-lifetime situation.”

Ketelaar wants to start moving tenants into his apartments in June. That requires getting the building enclosed now so workers can work through the winter. Luckily, they poured the underground parking garage last spring, before the shortage hit. And “we’re using precast concrete now,” he says. All of the walls and floors are coming on semis, from Kerkstra Precast in Grandville. Ciulis says Kerkstra is so big that it’s near the top of the list when it came time to divvy up the concrete on hand (state road projects come first). “But other [companies] that don’t buy as much as we buy, they’re the ones that are having the problem.”

If you’re a little guy, “You gotta beg,” Ciulis says. “Normally when you’ve got this problem, you call them up today and say, ‘I want some concrete on the job tomorrow.’ They’ll say, ‘We’ll be there.’ Now you have to start planning two weeks in advance and say, ‘Hey, I’m gonna need it two weeks from now,’ and hopefully they’ll accommodate you.”

Dan DeGraaf, CEO of the Michigan Concrete Association, is optimistic that the crisis won’t repeat itself next year. He says both St. Marys and LaFarge plan to increase their storage capacity and expand their fleets of trucks. And Superior Materials’ Jeff Spahr predicts that this year’s shortage won’t last much longer. With the onset of winter, construction should slow down enough that suppliers will be able to “get caught back up.”

So far, suppliers are honoring the prices they quoted before the shortage–“about a thousand dollars a truckload,” according to local contractor Dave Duetsch. But they’ve also warned their customers to expect an increase next year. Duetsch and others are bracing themselves to pay about 10 percent more in 2015.