Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question is from the line of Stephen Trent – Citi.
Stephen Trent – Citigroup
Just one or two quick questions for me. I was curious if you could give us some color, you mentioned – I saw in the release there were some litigation-type charges and I'm just curious as to what's going on there.
And two, some of the cement industry has had previously stated that they were looking to do a price increase this year, which seems like it's going to be a little bit tough. But I'm wondering if you could offer some color on what you're seeing on that side. And forgive me I missed some of your comments earlier.
Robert Hardy
Okay. What we'll do is we'll divide this up. I'll let Michael kind of walk you through the regional play of what's going on with cement prices in light of this environment, but I'll touch briefly on the class action lawsuits that we've referred to in this call.
It's been going on for a couple of years and we've been trying to settle this, but basically it's several class action lawsuits with certain drivers in Northern California related to what's called a wage and hour lawsuit, and there's a lot of companies that are kind of in this type of litigation arena right now, including ourselves. And as we proceed through the litigation process we made an assessment and accrued another $3.3 million related to these four suits.
We're trying to get it settled, but we may litigate it in 2009 and so we're carrying just under $5 million on our balance sheet right now.
Stephen Trent – Citigroup
Okay. That's very clear.
Michael Harlan
Yes Steve, on the cement side of the equation, in the last year the cement industry in total, if you will, announced pretty aggressive price increases for January of '09. I would have to say, as a general walk rule, those are not holding up that well in most markets.
In our West Texas market where business has actually been fairly good and the outlook is reasonably positive for 2009, we are experiencing an increase. We've seen some increases in other markets in Texas as well, but we do have some markets where those price increases have been rolled back. So it's more of a stable environment than an increasing environment on a broad national basis.
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