Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Construction boom draws outside help

Tradesmen from far away find good wages, plentiful work in Wood River Valley


By GREG STAHL
Express Staff Writer

Mike Christensen, a Utah resident working on a large residential construction project in Hailey, is part of a growing force of workers coming to the Wood River Valley to take part in the region?s booming building industry. ?This project?s going good,? he said. ?I?m excited to be up here for the next year and a half.? Photo by Willy Cook

When it comes to construction, the Wood River Valley is importing employees and exporting money.

On any given week during the peak of the summer construction season, hundreds of skilled blue-collar workers travel to the Sun Valley area to get a piece of the ever-growing, $100 million plus construction pie. The wages, generally, are higher here, and there is no shortage of work.

They come from Boise. They come from Pocatello and Idaho Falls. They come from Mackay. They come from Stanley. They come from as far away as Salt Lake City, and sometimes even farther.

“Good pay,” summarized Gooding resident Ed Becker, who works for Boise-based Mattson Fire Sprinklers Inc. “Construction is booming up here. There’s more going on than anybody can handle. We have more bids out than we can do.”

According to a 2001 economic analysis of Blaine County, which was commissioned by the Sun Valley-Ketchum Chamber & Visitors Bureau, there is more “out-of-county leakage” on construction expenditures than on goods and services oriented industries.

“This is especially true for non-residential new building construction,” according to the report’s authors, Portland, Ore.-based Dean Runyan Associates. “Non-local con-struction services are more likely to be employed in commercial, industrial and public works because of scale and the requirement for more specialized contractors.”

As an example, the general contractor for Blaine County’s new $3.4 million, 20,000-squarefoot

Courthouse Annex office building was a national construction company called Benetton Construction. The general contractor for Sun Valley Co.’s giant new lodge at Dollar Mountain is Idaho Falls-based Inter Mountain Construction.

But Becker pointed out that the general contractors often employ a number of locally based subcontractors.

On a smaller scale, skilled workers travel daily from communities on the Snake River Plain and a number of south central Idaho communities. It’s a trend that doesn’t make all of the local contractors very happy.

One local carpenter, who declined to be identified, said he wished “all the flatlanders would just stay home.” He wasn’t alone in expressing this sentiment.

“It’s the people who come up from Twin, Shoshone and so-on,” said Lynn Cromar, who co-owns High Desert Roofing with partner Dan Kosmecki. “They drive the wages down. The guys from Jerome can underbid us easily. With the increase of land prices here, we couldn’t af-ford to live here anymore.”

Though they were working last week on the roof of a new home in Hailey, Cromar and Kosmecki recently moved to McCall, where they said the work is more abundant and the housing is much cheaper. After 15 years basing its business locally, High Desert Roofing has become another outside contractor in the Wood River Valley. However, Cromar said he doesn’t plan to work here much, aside from special cases.

Becker, who is working on Sun Valley Co.’s new Dollar Cabin, said 90 percent of the workers on that site are from outside Blaine County. Those who can, drive home every day. Those who live farther away stay during the week in local hotels and try to spend their weekends at home.




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