John Foudray of the MC Lioness Realty Group may have summed up the challenge most tersely as “the quantity and quality of the workforce.”
“People is the issue,” agreed Dennis Thompson of Walton Construction. “None of our problems will get solved without good people.”
The “good” part is the hard part. Robert Zahner, representing the Zahner Company and The Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors National Association (SMACNA), spoke of the “increasingly difficult” challenge of finding new, competent workers.
Greg Graves described this as a three-level challenge. On the first level was just the “raw shortage of labor.” That is, people who are willing to take a job, show up on time, work hard and come back the next day. Second was the lack of personnel for the “high-quality stuff.” And third was the shortfall in people qualified to do labor supervision.
Bob Gould of Gould Evans, an architectural firm, added an additional wrinkle. He argued that there has been a change in the marketplace. “The private sector is so much stronger now than the public,” and that in turn has affected “the people we need and the way we execute work.”
If there was full agreement on the impending shortage in quality people, there was, as of yet, no consensus strategy for addressing the issue. Rick Wallace of the Greater Kansas City Building & Construction Trades was admittedly happy that the work was coming to Kansas City, perhaps even an “overabundance” of the same, and he was confident that his people could handle the work. To accomplish this, he saw the need to focus both on training people already in the pipeline and on recruiting those not yet in. The latter would take some image-changing. As he lamented, right now building trades ranks something like 248th out of 250 as a desired career path among students. He recommended a marketing plan to change attitudes and a mutual determination to stay as “involved as we can be in interesting young individuals.”
“Construction has a low status in the minds of kids,” agreed Don Greenwell of the Home Builders Association. He suggested that all interested parties had a public relations challenge on their hands. It would make sense, he suggested, to evaluate the whole life cycle of the construction career, from secondary school on.
Participants also hoped to increase the value of the existing workforce. Rosana Privitera-Biondo of Mark One Electric believes that “the productivity of labor is a problem.” She recommended that the unions, the associations and the contractors “pay attention” to their people. To affect a change in the culture and to help generate new supervisors, she argued for the “need to empower these people.”
There is a certain urgency to this perceived need. Ernie Straub of Straub Construction believes that in the next few years, a “real shortage of competent labor” could make the labor shortages of four to five years ago seem minor. Dennis Thompson believes that the “pig”—in this case, the demand for labor—“comes through the python in mid-2006 or 2007.”
Thompson was relatively optimistic about the problem. On the plus side, the man-hour requirements for 2007 are estimated to be not much higher than in 1995 and 1996, and he believes that a good portion of the labor force will find its way back to Kansas City and back into construction. What worries him is whether these workers will have maintained their skill and their work ethic in the interim.
For Graves, this combination of an uncertain and inadequately trained labor force, in conjunction with tight budgets and tight schedules, could lead to some serious safety issues. “We don’t have a meeting here that we don’t begin with safety,” he volunteered. He worried out loud whether the industry would be able to maintain its safety achievements of the last several years.
Capacity Issues
City Manager Wayne Cauthen expressed his concern about how much capacity there is to absorb the work that the city is sending out the door. “This construction season will be full tilt,” he noted.
“There are so many projects we are working on,” affirmed David Rezac of 360 Architecture, “it is a challenge getting them out the door sooner so that the contractors can get to work.” As Rezac noted, quick turnaround means better prices and better value. The major challenge for Craig Scranton’s BNIM Architects is much the same: “How do we deliver projects on time and budget?”
“We are seeing capacity issues in this region,” cautioned Terry Dunn, but not the kind of issues that the “explosive growth” regions in the southeast and southwest are experiencing. These “sexier areas of the country” will continue to outpace Kansas City in building. This is, of course, a mixed blessing for Kansas City, as Dunn does not envision that kind of sustained long-term growth for the city.