Contractors brace for COVID impacts in 2021
The construction industry in Northern Colorado has come through COVID-19 unscathed so far, but business executives worry about what they might face come the first and second quarters of 2021.
“The construction industry is generally a lagging indicator,” said John Warren, president of Connell Resources Inc., an employer of about 270 workers in Northern Colorado based in Windsor.
“As government budgets go down, we’ll see the impacts. In Q1, Q2 of 2021 there could be impacts,” he said.
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Warren and two executives from ECI Construction Management Inc., a Loveland company that works largely in landscape construction, joined a meeting of NoCo Strong for Business on Wednesday. NoCo Strong is a collaborative of elected and appointed government officials in Northern Colorado that meets to discuss impacts of COVID and how governments are responding.
Warren, along with Brian Peterson, founder of ECI, and Ted Johnson, president of ECI, agreed that governments in the region have worked hard over the past several months to keep public projects moving. Those projects have helped companies such as ECI and Connell keep employees on the job.
Peterson encouraged governments to “focus on what is going well … and keep what is viable.” He asked that cities maintain their planning and engineering staffs so that projects can move through the administrative process and be inspected in a timely manner.
Warren said he’d appreciate “starting the conversation now about what is to come. … We rely on projected projects coming out to bid, and very few have hit their target dates. We need to get a true understanding of where budgets are at,” he said.
Rod Wensing, Loveland deputy city manager, said cities are just now projecting their budgets for the coming year. “We’ve learned this [COVID] is impacting communities differently and smaller communities are weathering this better than larger communities,” he said. “Until yesterday, we had just one data point, and now two, so we haven’t had a lot to share,” he said in reference to sales and use tax revenue reports.
Like many communities, Loveland has kept design work of public projects going so that they can be constructed in 2021 if conditions permit.
While contractors have generally liked how local governments have worked to streamline approvals over the past few months, they did ask for better coordination between departments — traffic and utilities, for example — and perhaps creation of liaison positions to be a single point of contact for contractors looking to complete projects.
