Jim Kollaer's blog

The American Subcontractors Association (ASA) held their Spring Business Forum and Convention in Las Vegas this past weekend. At the event, the ASA announced nine companies as this year’s winners of the Excellence in Ethics Award.

According to the committee:

“ASA’s Excellence in Ethics Awards program promotes the highest standards of internal and external integrity for a subcontracting firm, said Shannon MacArthur, MEMCO, Spring, Texas, chair of the ASA Task Force on Ethics in the Construction Industry, which developed the awards program. Each applicant was required to respond to questions concerning the firm’s corporate ethics policies and procedures, its construction practices, and its general business practices. Each applicant also was required to submit detailed documentation, including sealed letters of recommendation from a customer, a competitor and a supplier.”

This year’s winners are: [node:read-more:link]

According to the UK digital magazine Dezeen, Chinese contractors tried to cut costs in Shenzen, and that cost shaving has put 15 or so buildings, including the tallest building in China, in danger of collapse.

According to the article, Contractors used sea sand, instead of river or lake sand, to make the concrete used in those buildings. The salts and chlorides found in the sea sand will corrode the rebar in the building, which could cause it to collapse. The corrosive sea sand is half the price of the less corrosive lake and river sand, which is in very short supply due to the high volume of construction in the country.

One of the 15 buildings found to have used this sand in construction is the Ping’an Finance Center designed by Kohn Patterson and Fox to be the tallest structure in China when it is completed in 2015. The building has been under construction since 2009, but work has been suspended pending the outcome of the investigations. [node:read-more:link]

After the recent American Subcontractors Association (ASA) panel on the origins and current status of the Construction Career Collaborative (C3) movement in the Houston region, Construction Citizen caught up with two of the panelists to get their reactions and any additional comments they might want to add to the conversation.

Peter Dawson, Senior Vice President of Facilities Services at Texas Children’s Hospital, and John Roberts, Executive Vice President of Jones Lang LaSalle’s Project and Development Services Group, are newly elected to the C3 Board of Directors and have been strong advocates of C3 concepts such as paying construction workers by the hour as employees, paying appropriate taxes on the workforce and providing the construction workforce with the best safety training available.   [node:read-more:link]

Morgan Brennan of the Forbes staff penned a great piece recently that “states the obvious” to folks in the construction industry - There will be Labor shortages!  She quotes some very credible sources to indicate the current state of the industry and the rising need for skilled labor in both the residential and non-residential sectors as the economy begins to recover.

Here in Houston for example, the economy is recovering at a rapid pace. Within a mile of my office, there are currently over 1,000 multifamily units under construction. Last weekend, I toured a single family home that had been listed only 3 days earlier. I was told by the listing agent that they had had 105 visits and 4 contracts already [node:read-more:link]

One of New York City’s major museums, the Whitney Museum of American Art, will move to a new location in early 2015. The new, 200,000 square foot building was designed by renowned architect, Renzo Piano, and is being built under the management of Turner Construction. The site overlooks the Hudson River and is situated in the Meatpacking District at the intersection of Washington and Gansevoort Streets.

Since the mid-1960s, the Whitney Museum of American Art has been located in Upper Manhattan at the intersection of Madison and 75th streets in a striking building designed by the late architect Marcel Breuer. The Whitney Museum recently negotiated a deal to let the Museum of Modern Art use the Upper Manhattan gallery space for at least 8 years. [node:read-more:link]

The Houston Chapter of the American Subcontractor Association (ASA) recently hosted a luncheon panel that focused on the progress of the Construction Career Collaborative (C3), a local organization created to ensure a sustainable workforce for the construction industry. C3 is in its infancy, but has already made an impact on projects in the Houston region. This panel discussion gave an overview of the issues, the progress being made today and the plans for the future.

The panel consisted of Jim Stevenson, the President of McCarthy Building Companies, Inc. in Houston and the current chairman of the C3 Executive Committee; Peter Dawson, the Senior Vice President of Facilities Services at Texas Children’s Hospital and the owner’s representative for one of the C3 pilot projects under construction today; John Roberts, the Executive Vice President of Project and Development Services for Jones Lang LaSalle and member of the C3 Executive Committee; and Danny Thompson, Construction Director of Vaughn Construction and contractor on one of the five C3 pilot projects.   [node:read-more:link]

Construction might be slow in some parts of the country, but despite Mayor Bloomberg’s restrictions on soft drinks, there is a big gulp on the West Side of Manhattan right now that will change the skyline again.

Ground was broken in December on the Hudson Yards project. The “Big Gulp” (my words) mini-city will consist of, according to Business Insider, 16 buildings, one of them taller than the Empire State Building. The development, when fully built and re-zoned, will consist of 25 million square feet of Class A office space, 20,000 housing units, 2 million square feet of hotel space, a 750 seat public school, a million feet of retail and 20 acres of public open space. The first building will be a 1 million square foot office building whose major tenant will be [node:read-more:link]

We recently interviewed Katrina Kersch, the Acting Executive Director of the Construction Career Collaborative (C3), to better understand the origins and the current status of the overall program.

In this video, Katrina tells us that the C3 movement developed out of The Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) studies in 2008 and from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics projections that predicted a major shortage of mid-level construction workers in the middle of this decade.   [node:read-more:link]

Google is bringing its “driverless cars” to I-35 this week in a bold move to convince Texas Legislators to look to the future and to consider how we might accommodate “driverless” cars on the roads of Texas.

The possibility of “driverless” cars and trucks (they are guided by their GPS and equipment) on the roads of Texas is both scary and exciting. Scary in that we cherish our cars and the way we can drive them. Exciting in that we can reduce deaths on our highways and, faced with a longstanding shortage of funding not only to build new roads, but also maintain the ones we have, this technological change might [node:read-more:link]

According to an article in the Washington Post, the uptick in the economy has many highly skilled workers looking for better jobs. These workers may have been frozen in place during the last 4 years when jobs were limited and just having a job was primary, but now with the improvement in the job market, many employers are finding themselves with more voluntary turnover. That means either their key employees are being wooed away or their workers are feeling more confident in their future and are venturing out into the marketplace.

The article states: 

“Experts say the increased interest in jumping ship is driven by a variety of factors, most of which seem to reflect a workforce that has grown weary of the corporate belt-tightening that was commonplace during the recession.

[node:read-more:link]