Oregon Public Broadcasting

The construction industry in the Northwest will have to ramp up very fast if the economic stimulus package making its way through Congress is to work as intended.

Lawmakers in the nation’s capital -- and in Salem -- are putting out feelers to contractors and trade associations.

They want to know if there’s enough asphalt, skilled workers,  and bidders to go around if every state and city dumps a load of “ready-to-go” projects at once.  Correspondent Tom Banse went looking for answers too.

The daily dose of bad economic news cranks up public interest in a federal and maybe a state stimulus package.  But hand-and-hand come nagging questions.

Maybe even misgivings.   Or images of vast sums of your money going to waste.  Concerns like that gave rise to questions like these at a legislative work session in Olympia.

Duke Schaub: “Does the construction industry have the capacity to contract and construct projects?”

Mike Armstrong: “When we lay people off from these construction jobs, do they stay in the state and just try to find something else?  Do they leave the state?  How quick can they get reemployed?”

Doug Ericksen: “So if the feds do pump a ton of money into transportation infrastructure... what does that do to the cost of materials, just having the asphalt and the aggregate and everything ready to go within six months.”

In Olympia, and Salem, Boise, and Washington, D.C., contractor trade associations are offering reassurances.  On the frontlines, there’s also confidence in the industry’s capacity to put people to work. 

Mike Lee is president of Lakeside Industries, one of the biggest asphalt paving companies in the Northwest.

Mike Lee: “If we were to bid a project tomorrow, and that municipality was ready to go – or the DOT was ready to go -- which typically they are, we could be at work in a week.”

Lee says in good times, his company and the paving industry as a whole gets about half its business from government.  The other half is private contracts.  It could be a housing development, or a driveway, or jobs like this parking lot at a new apartment complex in Lacey, Washington.

Mike Lee says the recession has “all but dried up” the private side of the business.

Mike Lee: “And so, if you take our industry and suddenly there’s excess capacity, and now you’re talking about federal and a little bit of state stimulus to replace it, it won’t even replace it to the level where we were in 2007 or ’08.”

Lee says people may have a mistaken impression about the size of the highway and bridge repair slice of the economic stimulus plan.  In both the U.S. House and Senate versions, highway infrastructure spending accounts for less than five percent of the total stimulus package.