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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted at 12:20 p.m., Thursday, August 7, 2003

Army awards $1.1 billion housing contract

By Dan Nakaso
Advertiser Staff Writer

Actus Lend Lease has won the first of three high-stakes bids to build and refurbish military housing on O‘ahu with a $1.1 billion Army contract involving 7,700 homes, Congressman Neil Abercrombie’s office announced today.

Construction is scheduled to begin in November 2004. Actus Lend Lease will be responsible for constructing, leasing and maintaining the homes for 50 years under what the Department of Defense calls it’s new “privatized” housing program.

The entire project is worth $6.9 billion over the 50-year life, Abercrombie spokesman Mike Slackman said.

Actus Lend Lease is based in Napa, Calif., but has built military homes in Hawai‘i for more than a decade. The company expects that 90 percent of the sub-contracting work for the Army project will go to local companies, said Richard Crawford, vice president of business operations and military relations. Crawford is a retired Marine colonel and the former commander commander of Marine Corps Base Hawai‘i.

Actus Lend Lease has built two other so-called “privatized” military home projects on the Mainland, each involving about 5,000 houses. The O‘ahu Army project, however, “is the largest privatization contract in the nation,” said Robert “Scotty” Scott, Actus Lend Lease’s regional vice president of construction.

“We’re going to run this like it’s a local operation,” he said. “We don’t plan on importing anybody. We all live here, we’ve been here 10, 15 years and been doing military construction for the Army, Navy, Air Force.”

Reach Dan Nakaso at dnakaso@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8085.