Courtesy Paul Post
By Paul Post
Construction officials are optimistic about their industry’s prospects, while voicing concerns about ongoing labor shortages and the potential impact of Trump Administration tariffs on material and supplies pricing.
Several dozen business leaders turned out recently for an “Outlook for Construction 2025” panel discussion at SUNY Adirondack’s Wilton campus, hosted by Saratoga County Chamber of Commerce and Saratoga Economic Development Corp.
“Coming off a couple of roller coaster-type years, 2024 kind of evened things out,” said Kylie Holland, Curtis Lumber Company executive vice president. “It allowed us to step back, take a deep breath and plan for uncertainty of the future. The cost of everything is up; the cost of doing business, labor, everything is still running at inflationary levels. Tariffs could potentially trickle down to our level in 2025.”
But a 25 percent tariff doesn’t mean there will be a 25 increase percent locally, she said.
“We have an incredible purchasing department that studies our lumber market,” Holland said. “We’ve been through this before. We’re always trying to get ahead of the game, be proactive.”
“Uncertainty is a word that gets thrown around pretty heavily in our industry,” said David Collins, D.A. Collins Companies president. “2024 was a good year for our company overall. We had a lot of good strong backlog work. The predictability for 2025 is a little off; trying to do more with less with regard to availability of people. We aren’t seeing a lot of talent in the market. That has been our biggest restrictor of growth.”
The Wilton-based firm does a great deal of state and federally-funded highway jobs such as its current involvement in a $2 billion, Interstate-81 project in Syracuse. But it’s also shifting gears to more privately-financed jobs. In part, this is because many state Department of Transportation employees, who started out during a 1993 hiring binge, are now retiring and being replaced by less experienced people, he said.
“There’s a massive gap in talent,” Collins said. “If you walk through the halls of DOT there are so many retirement cakes being delivered, it’s crazy. The mass exodus of talent within departments is concerning.”
Similarly, there’s a shortage of skilled trades people in the industry, he said.
“If there was a better pipeline of quality, qualified people to build New York and Vermont we would probably would have gotten more work and gotten more opportunities,” Collins said. “But we’re being very selective in what we go after now. We used to jump on bids. Now it’s, what resources do we have that we can bid it and bid it responsibly?”
“Historically in our industry you recruited farm kids,” he said. “They know how to fix and operate equipment, they know how to work long hard hours. Now those farms aren’t around like they used to be. It’s difficult recruiting people. Now someone who was a line cook at Chili’s yesterday wants to be a carpenter tomorrow. That’s great, we like the attitude, but there’s risk and liability with someone who isn’t familiar with the work. A lot of danger goes with it. It takes training and safety to get people ready for jobs in our industry. It’s a challenge.”
Also, as minimum wage goes up, the difference between a fast-food worker’s pay and a construction laborer’s salary isn’t as much, which makes it hard to attract people who would rather flip burgers than hammer nails on a cold, winter day.
James Dawsey, president of Malta-based MLB Construction Services, said he’s “very optimistic” about the year ahead with a $100 million backlog of projects to work on.
“We’ve had a fairly good five- to 10-percent growth rate over the past several years,” he said. “We’ve done some incredible projects.”
The list includes Skidmore College’s Center for Integrated Sciences, a 10-story building at the Navy’s West Milton nuclear submarine training site, and a new Jim Dandy bar at the lower clubhouse of Saratoga Race Course. The firm is also working on a major project at Albany International Airport that will continue till spring 2026, and it got the job to upgrade Lake Placid’s Olympic bobsled run.
“But we are a union contractor,” Dawsey said. “A lot of union negotiations are coming up this year. Laborers are making more than carpenters. I’m worried about wage rates. Carpenters will want more. We have an aging workforce and we aren’t getting the same caliber of people we did 10 to 20 years ago.”
In addition, Project Labor Agreements that mandate union workers are “eliminating a lot of great (non-union) sub-contractors … diluting the base of what you need to get work done,” he said.
Large-scale projects such as Champlain Hudson Power Express that will deliver Canadian hydropower to New York City, and GlobalFoundries’ proposed new facility also strain an already thin workforce. GlobalFoundries announced plans last month to create a new center for advanced packaging and testing of U.S.-made essential chips within its Malta plant at Luther Forest Technology Campus.
Chamber President Todd Shimkus said that while Saratoga County’s overall population is growing, a survey of all local school districts revealed a 10 percent decline in student numbers, from kindergarten through 12th grade, during the past decade.
“That funnel is not headed in the right direction in terms of employment (future employees),” he said.
But Michael Munter, vice president of Greenfield-based Munter Enterprises, Inc., said efforts to attract more young people to construction trades are starting to pay off.
“BOCES is stepping up and getting more involved,” he said. “The CTE (career and technical education) pipeline is showing young adults there is a world out there other than going to a university or two-year school. It’s the best we’ve seen in a long time. Labor has always been a challenge for the construction industry. We’re finally bringing some new light into our world.”
Curtis Lumber executive Doug Ford is founder and president of the Northeast Construction Trades Workforce Coalition, which has undertaken numerous steps to expose and attract young people of all ages, starting at the elementary school level, to good-paying and rewarding construction industry careers.
“A lot of kids in school don’t know about the trades, counselors don’t know how to talk to kids about trades,” he said. “Getting into grammar schools is making a huge difference. Our industry is at fault. We haven’t coordinated with schools. College and military recruiters, other businesses are in there. We need to be, too.”
Curtis Lumber has nearly two dozen stores in northern New York and Vermont.
Holland said construction firms could benefit by welcoming more women to their payrolls and helping young people see there are other jobs available, such as design and accounting, in addition to trades.
“We’re not the most progressive industry in the world,” she said. “We’ve done things the same way for a very long period of time. There’s nothing wrong with that when it works, but there’s so much change happening in the world that we need to step up to the plate and offer a different culture, attract different people into our industry and provide different products and services to customers to better support our communities.”
“We’re putting a lot of effort into recruiting,” Holland said. “Recruiting is going to be really heavy this year.”
“We need to give kids more of a view about what we actually do,” Dawsey said. “In a room like this, one person does carpets, another lights, sprinklers, dry wall, acoustical panels. We need to give kids a basis for wanting to get into this business and try to excite them about its opportunities. Hopefully it will pay dividends in the future.”