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Kyle Chock
Executive director, The Pacific Resource Partnership, a bridge between the Hawaii Carpenters Union, the state's largest construction union, and major contractors.
Chock has a heavy heart thinking about the 3,000 members of the union who are unemployed. "Flat is the new growth," he laments. While several big projects will create more jobs, it won't be enough to sustain the third largest sector of the state economy, he says.
Q: What major projects are coming down the pipe for the construction industry?
A: Despite the bad economy, there has still been some significant investment by major corporations and the government. The one I point to most is the Disney project at Ko Olina. It's got to be in the neighborhood of $850 million and probably higher. It's a catalyst project for Ko Olina, in a sense that it's Walt Disney; it's a huge brand that other companies are going to want to be around. It's great for both the short term and the long term in that it's creating a lot of great jobs - not only construction - and it's also adding to the capacity of the Waianae Coast. It's a huge job site. It has 400 construction workers out there and, for the most part, they're local workers. Throughout the life of the project, there will be about 1,000 construction jobs that it will create.
I think another good news story is the Department of Hawaiian Homelands and the role that it's playing as a home builder right now at a time when most of the market home builders like Castle & Cooke, Gentry, DR Horton aren't really building. The...