'Fancy new buildings' keep job crews happy
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Despite reports of steady growth, many residents aren't feeling it
Voyager doomed by changing Japanese market
When bloom's gone, you cultivate your market
By Glenn Scott
Advertiser Staff Writer
After a day directing drywall construction for a restaurant at Victoria Ward Center, Jason Caporus takes a swig from a Pepsi and hesitatingly predicts that, for workers like him, jobs should be steady for at least the next year.
Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser
A busy slate of work is a satisfying prospect for the likes of Caporus, a foreman for the O'ahu branch of Performance Contracting Inc., a Kansas-based speciality contracting company. After enduring a decade when trades-
Left to right: Albert Bala, William Callaham, Jason Caporus and Allan Taketa at the construction site of the Ward Entertainment Center
people came to expect unrewarding gaps between jobs, he says, workers again are slowly raising their expectations.
Caporus says Mainland companies have begun increasing their investments in commercial building on O'ahu.
The foreman nodded at the nearby $40 million Ward Entertainment Center, where his company is completing the interior for the Islands' first Dave & Buster's restaurant.
"All these fancy new buildings are going up," Caporus said, "and now everybody else — all the competitors — have got to find the money to build, too."
Bruce Coppa, director of the Pacific Resource Partnership, an alliance of the carpenters' union and builders, agreed that hotel and retail companies face competitive pressures to upgrade after deferring projects over the course of a decade.
Waikiki has reached the point where things can't wait, he said, suggesting that the Hilton Hawaiian Village's new Kalia Tower has added urgency to renovation plans for nearby hotels.
"They have to," he said. "Their competition is not only the world but their next-door neighbor."
Coppa said construction in 2000 totaled $2.3 billion; it should hit $2.5 billion this year. Commercial construction costs reached $90 million in the first quarter of 2001, way up from $78 million last year and $65 million in 1999.
Denny Watts, president of Dick Pacific Inc., the state's largest construction company, says he's encouraged by the prospects of larger commercial projects and more business with governments. The Legislature earlier this year approved items totaling $500 million in construction.
