The longstanding shortage of skilled construction labor is forcing companies’ leaders to take more concrete action to remedy the situation.

A generational lack of workers can be attributed to aftereffects of the Great Recession, when hundreds of thousands of them left the industry in response to a lack of steady work. Now, however, construction is booming in the Pacific Northwest and other markets, and the total number of workers still has not reached the figures seen over a decade ago.

“It is has always been a concern to find enough skilled trades workers,” Kirby Nagelhout Construction President Jeff Deswert said. “Recently, if you look at the average age of our tradespeople, it’s not sustainable right now. What we’ll see is due to the efforts toward technology and higher education and the results of the recession, where nobody was entering the trades then. We’re going to find ourselves in a real pickle in the times ahead, not that we’re not in a pickle now.”

Deswert and his Bend-based company are taking action. Together with Central Oregon contractor Sunwest Builders, Kirby Nagelhout Construction is spearheading a public-private partnership with Central Oregon Community College to offer a to prospective construction workers.

Operating much like pre-apprenticeship programs in the Portland-metro area, the COCC course offers students an introduction to construction – instruction of both technical skills and soft skills.

“It definitely started with the contractors coming to us,” said Rachel Knox, the continuing education program manager at COCC. “For a long time, we wanted to do something here in Central Oregon, but we really didn’t know where to start. So when it landed in my lap I made a commitment that we would start this fall. It’s not a perfect start, but we’re just getting going.”

The non-credit course started last month and will run for six weeks. Classes are held two nights a week in workshop space provided by the Bend college. The first 14 students are being taught the very basics of the industry, including how to read blueprints, carry out construction math, prevent injuries, use tools and communicate clearly. The basic expectations of the industry, such as punctuality, are laid out for students.

Deswert and Steve Buettner, owner of Sunwest Builders, are lead instructors for the course. They are joined by tradespeople from other partners, including Griffin Construction, Hayden Homes, Northwest Framing Systems, Miller Lumber, Skanska USA, the Central Oregon Builders Association and CS Construction.

These firms also helped set up the Central Oregon Community College Construction and Trades Scholarship Fund to support students pursuing a career in construction. The COBA was especially helpful, contributing $50,000 toward the cause, Knox said.

The program is based on National Center for Construction Education and Research curriculum, which is also used by Portland’s Northwest College of Construction for its apprenticeship programs.

“We’re trying to address the most painful skills gap first,” Knox said. “We’re starting at the absolute basics, and really there are so many pain points. Some of it is technical skill for sure, and some of it is the soft skills like how do we get them to ask (instructors) intelligent questions and build confidence.”

The program will be more refined by next year, Knox said.

“We’re just at the launch right now,” she said.

The industry’s workforce situation, Deswert said, is not just a product of the recession, but also the public education system’s long-standing devaluation of skilled trades. Deswert acquired in high school valuable welding skills that allowed him to find employment immediately after graduation. From there, he worked his way through the ranks to eventually become a company president. That path barely exists anymore, he said. Yet there are signs of change.

“We’re seeing that the high school levels are starting to put CTE programs back in place where they were really missing for the last couple of decades,” Deswert said. “The education community has heard our cry loud and clear and I think we’re seeing that.”

The COCC program, he added, is at least in part a response to that.

“We’re wanting to add on to what the school systems are coming back to,” he said. “It’s best for kids who learn hands-on, and the school systems are seeing that.”

The students are now approaching the end of the program, which had them construct two small structures in a college workshop space. The course’s classroom portion takes up a minority of students’ time.

“It has to be very hands-on,” Knox said. “If we’re in the classroom for more than about an hour and a half we’re going to lose these folks; they gravitate toward construction because they don’t want to be in the classroom.”

Another part of the issue, Knox added, is that it is really a community-wide discussion.

“We are talking to the high schools and their CTE programs, all the alternative programs, the GED programs,” she said. “And if I’m doing this, I’m holding a pipe and I don’t have a pipeline. So what we’re more interested in is how … we find ways to link up to other options in Central Oregon.”

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Central Oregon Community College, spurred by steady enrollment growth, is adding a $15.6 million residence hall on its Bend campus.

The 330-bed, Z-shaped building will include a central kitchen, collaborative work space and group meeting rooms, said Mike Levesque, project manager for Lease Crutcher Lewis, which is the construction manager-general contractor. Mahlum Architects, which has a Portland office, is the lead architect — in association with Bend-based Pinnacle Architecture. Construction is set to finish by June 2015.

The team is targeting Earth Advantage Multifamily gold certification via a waste management reduction plan in which 95 percent of the site’s wood, cardboard and drywall will be recycled.

The residence hall will be tucked away on campus behind a wooded area, obscuring views from Mount Washington Drive and adjacent neighborhoods, according to COCC.

“It is built into a hill – there’s a lot of rock out here,” Levesque said. “We are using that rock to build retaining walls. We’re also installing stormwater facilities so that the stormwater doesn’t leave the site.”

The four- and five-story building will have a common kitchen facility, a laundry facility, a game and lounge facility, and student study rooms, Levesque said. The hall will be used year-round, and accommodate conferences in summertime.

The CM-GC process allowed the college, which funded the $20 million project through a self-financed bond, to better know the costs up front, said Ron Paradis, spokesman for COCC. It’s the first time COCC has used a CM-GC model, he said.

“We just felt we could not get far into the process and not know what the total costs would be,” he said.

Meanwhile, construction also is under way on the 34,000-square-foot, $12.5 million Redmond Technology Education Center at COCC’s Redmond campus. Kirby Nagelhout Construction Co. is the general contractor and BBT Architects is the architect for the project.

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A new facility designed by for ‘s Redmond campus will benefit more than the school, according to Kevin Shaver, senior project manager for the firm.

“It can encourage industrial growth and technological growth in our area and create new businesses,” he said. “They see this as a technology hub for the Redmond campus, but it will also be of value to the communities of Redmond and Central Oregon.”

The 37,618-square-foot technology education center will include classroom laboratories, group study spaces and computer labs. A large portion of the labs will be devoted to hybrid automobile research, Shaver said.

Additionally, the building will contain a large amphitheater able to hold up to 100 students. It could be rented out for guest lectures.

“(The facility) will be right next to the airport, so the thought is that technological industries come down and see this facility and think, ‘Boy, that would be a great place to hold a seminar,’ Shaver said.

The building’s form was designed out of concrete, steel, glass and aluminum panels. An open, structural steel frame will contain board-formed concrete for flexibility, Shaver said. Also, a large portion of the classrooms and laboratories were designed to accommodate a variety of curriculums because future uses aren’t set.

“Part of this project’s goal is flexibility, so (it’s about) designing for things they don’t know yet,” he said.

COCC has campuses in Bend, Redmond, Madras and Prineville. The building will be a large addition to the 25-acre Redmond campus, where the three existing buildings have a total of approximately 52,000 square feet.

Construction is expected to start by the end of this month and finish by fall 2013. is the general contractor.

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A lot of green is going into the $12.5 million science building project at Central Oregon Community College in Bend.

Energy-saving techniques and green products are being used in construction, and the finished product will feature green science labs that use fewer fume hoods and less caustic materials, said Rick Hayes, COCC project manager.

The building is part of an pilot project to certify small commercial buildings, and Hayes said the school is pursuing EA gold certification.

“We’re kind of guinea pigs, but we get a lot of advantages from the program,” Hayes said. “Earth Advantage has modeled a lot of building types regionally and (it) has some prescriptive guides locally for energy savings that we want to use.”

The EA program ranks buildings in five areas: materials, land, health, water and energy. The energy component uses standards developed by the Energy Trust of Oregon and New Buildings Institute.

Earth Advantage will award silver, gold and platinum certifications in its new program, Hayes added.

“They’re moving toward certification for small-scale commercial buildings, and it’s less expensive for a project like ours than LEED certification would be,” he said.

The EA program, similar to the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, is slightly more focused on energy savings, added Mark Stoller, the principal in charge of the project at .

“One area they’re very interested in is the building envelope, or shell, and its performance,” Stoller said. “They look for continuous insulation where you don’t have windows so there are no thermal breaks.”

Windows in the 45,000-square-foot science building will use a high-performance glazing to keep in heat, and the site also will have radiant floor heating in the exposed concrete, he said.

Structural elements in the building include skylights that will illuminate both the top floor of the two-story building, and light wells that will let natural light reach the first story, Hayes said.

The western portion of the building will be a two-story open lobby with large windows facing the Cascades, which will also add a good amount of light, said Mike Taylor, general manager of , the project’s primary contractor.

“The whole western face of the building is this great view, with study rooms and conference rooms that take advantage of it,” Taylor said. “We like our view over here in Central Oregon.”

Because the chemistry department uses what it considers green chemistry – lab experiments with fewer and less caustic chemicals – the school was also able to reduce the number of fume hoods in each lab to two, and reduce energy use. Typically, science labs have more, Hayes said.

The school also plans to add solar panels to the roof, but officials haven’t decided yet on a plan, he said.

“We’re still determining how we want to do that – whether we’ll buy them ourselves or get into a power purchase agreement with somebody,” Hayes said. “We’re also not sure if we’ll put them in during construction or after.”

The heat transfer machine – a variable refrigerant flow system – will transfer energy within the building, Hayes said.

“It’s a three-pipe system that uses refrigerant and pumps,” Hayes said. “So if you have a room that maintains temperature better, or is … well insulated, it might have excess heat than a room down the hall with large windows. And the room with more windows might be cooler. So the system pushes the heat and cool around to redistribute the temperature more evenly.”

The system is made by Mitsubishi, and it’s relatively new to the Pacific Northwest, he said.

“It’s high efficiency and it’s relatively new to the West Coast,” Hayes said. “It’s a good system for energy savings as for an institution worried about operating costs, and it’s also good for the Earth Advantage system.”

Another difference from LEED is that in the EA program, officials come to the site with the architect and prime contractor three times during the construction process, Stoller said.

“Primarily they do that to inspect the building envelope, but they come and talk to everybody to make sure they all understand the process,” Stoller said. “With LEED, there’s nobody to come out during the construction phase.”

Construction on the site began shortly after the contract was awarded on Thursday. The first phase will involve removing part of a parking lot and then removing part of the underlying basalt hillside with rock hammers, Taylor said.

Workers will then start adding the structure’s concrete base, likely in early April, he said.

“One of the biggest schedule challenges, though, will be getting that hole dug,” Taylor said.

Because of some of the specialized lab casework and other work, the company is also bringing in more subcontractors than it does usually, he said.

“It’s moderately complex,” Taylor said. “There’s lots of stainless steel duct work, some pressure differences across the building we have to deal with.”

Construction should employ between 65 and 75 people in the region, he said.

“It’s a decent boost for the industry here,” Taylor said.

The building should be finished by mid-2012, he added.

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Bid Date/Time: Nov. 16, 2 p.m.

The health care industry is expected to grow in Oregon by 23 percent over the next five years, and create 25,000 new job opportunities by 2014. Approximately 70 percent of Oregon’s health-care workers are trained at community colleges, and Central Oregon Community College continues to provide a variety of opportunities.

This project consists of construction of a three-story, 47,000-square-foot building on a site at COCC’s campus in Bend.

The Health Careers Building will include general-purpose classrooms, faculty offices and seminar rooms. Also planned are simulation labs to train nurses, medical assistants, pharmacy technicians, licensed massage therapists and dental assistants. The latter two areas also will operate as public clinics, on a part-time basis.

A steel structure will be constructed, and include concrete stair towers. The building will be clad with materials including masonry, wood siding, wood shingles, glass and metal panels. Project partners expect to apply for gold certification through the Earth Advantage-Commercial program.

Work will commence on or before Dec. 6, and final completion is scheduled for April 30, 2012.

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Bid Date/Time: Oct. 14, 4 p.m.

Central Oregon Community College, in Bend, desires to prequalify prime contractors for the construction of an approximately 46,000-square-foot science building.

The new building will include: five biology labs, including specialized spaces for anatomy and physiology, botany, microbiology and general biology; two chemistry labs, allowing for innovative work in organic, inorganic and general chemistry; two physical science labs to support physics, engineering, general physical science and geology; small conference rooms; lab prep and support space; informal teaching and learning spaces on the first and second floors; an herbarium; a science faculty office; and three large classrooms.

Bid documents are anticipated to be ready in January 2011, and the contractor will start work in February. The project will be completed by August 2012.

The project is estimated to be between $16 million and $17.5 million, with funding provided by a 2009 voter-approved bond measure.

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