Lance Wilhelm

Lance Wilhelm earned a bachelor’s degree in communication from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1988, and shortly after began his long career in construction.

Yes, it seems an incongruous career path, but, as Wilhelm said earlier this month, "I figured regardless of whatever field I ended up in eventually, being able to communicate clearly and effectively was going to be important for my career."

These days, Wilhelm communicates clearly and effectively as senior vice president and Hawaii operations manager for Kiewit Infrastructure West Co., which usually does about $100-125 million worth of business a year in the state, but is best known right now for building the first phase of Honolulu’s new rail system, expected to cost overall at least $5.6 billion.

How did he end up at Kiewit? For a brief while after UH, he had worked for a small printing company, but the pay wasn’t great and he had a young family to support.

"I really needed abetter job bad, and found an ad in the paper that had the two most important words in it — "entry level" — so I went down and answered the ad and eventually was given the job (at Kiewit) as office manager trainee."

From there, he said, "I was really lucky to work with some guys early in my career who were willing to take some time to show me how things worked. They showed me things like how to read a set of plans and what they meant. They gave me a chance to go outside and see how the field operated."

Besides now leading Kiewit in Hawaii, Wilhelm also is a past president of the General Contractors Association of Hawaii, current vice president of the General Contractors Labor Association, chairman of the YMCA of Honolulu, and a trustee for a number of union trust funds, Island Pacific Academy in Kapolei and Kamehameha Schools, from which he graduated in 1983. He also is a board member of the University of Hawaii Foundation and a past president of the West Oahu Economic Development Council.

Wilhelm and his wife, Marcy, have two daughters and live in Royal Kunia.

Question: How big of a company is Kiewit Infrastructure West in Hawaii?

Answer: We do about $100-125 million annually. Typically, if you were to take the rail project out of the equation — because it’s such an anomaly — we would operate in Hawaii with about 80 full-time staff between all the divisions, depending on how much work we have going on.

It’s one of the unique qualities of the construction industry that it’s never really the same from one year to the next, so you do have to be somewhat flexible. But rail, being such a big part of our backlog currently, it really has inflated the operation here in Hawaii over the last couple of years.

Q: But all the people who work on the rail project, they’re not all Kiewit employees, right?

A: Sure, and that’s true with any specific project. There’s certain elements of work that we perform with our own forces, and then certain elements that we don’t. Typically those would include things like asphalt paving, which we don’t do, we subcontract it out; we don’t typically do our own design work when we’re involved in a design-build project like rail; we subcontract that effort out as well.

Q: As far as the rail goes right now, how many people do you have on the phase that you’re working on?

A: Just to clarify, we have three separate contracts that we’ve secured from HART (the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation). The first is the guideway design-build project that runs from the Kroc Center out west to Sam’s Club. Then there’s another phase that … runs from Sam’s Club to the stadium. And then we won the contract to build the maintenance and storage facility that sits almost dead center between those two projects. Between those three jobs, we have about 450 total people working the project right now; those are the direct jobs, people drawing a paycheck from Kiewit. That doesn’t include the many subcontractors that are also working on the project.

Q: What is the value of Kiewit’s contracts so far of the estimated $5.6 billion that the rail is expected to cost?

A: Between the three, we’re right about $1.3 billion. It represents about roughly half of the guideway itself, about 10 miles of the 20-mile system.

Q: Do you intend to bid on the second half?

A: Those plans are available right now … so we’ve grabbed them up and we’re evaluating those projects as well to see if we feel like we can be competitive.

Q: Is your current work coming along on time?

A: We have an aggressive schedule to get our phase of the work done, but … we have obstacles, like every other project has obstacles.

Q: What could hold you up?

A: Some of the things that impact schedule have to do with third-party utilities that we have to coordinate with. Some of the other issues have to do with just the physical condition of where we’re working, trying to make sure that we’re flexible and are coordinated with the traffic needs of the community, making adjustments around that.

Q: I was intrigued to learn that the company seems to have two divisions in Hawaii, one of them being for "vertical" projects, headed by Sharon Thom, and the other, headed by you, being for — what — horizontal projects?

A: You know, really, we do have more than a couple divisions that work in here and it’s really confusing, because we run under a couple different names and multiple divisions.

Essentially we have a group that focuses on vertical construction. We have a group that focuses on infrastructure projects — that would be grading, site work, utilities, that kind of stuff. And then we have a group here that focuses on industrial-mechanical kind of work, like treatment plants, power plants, transmission facilities, manufacturing plants, and we have a manager for each of those groups.

Ultimately, … they all eventually operate under that banner of Kiewit Infrastructure, even the building group. My last promotion, I guess you would call it, they asked me to kind of oversee the activities of all the groups.

Q: Would rail fall under infrastructure?

A: Yes. Typically, transportation, whether they be highways, bridges, or, in this case, rail transit, would fall under the infrastructure umbrella.

Q: Is Kiewit a road-paving company, too?

A: You know, we don’t operate that kind of business here. We do that on the mainland … but here we subcontract that kind of work. We do concrete paving. We do have that kind of equipment and expertise here on the island.

Q: Didn’t Kiewit do H-3?

A: I really started with Kiewit back in 1989 on one of the first projects on the

H-3 program. The H-3 was one of a series of a projects that the state Department of Transportation put out at that time, and I started on one of those. It was called the Haiku Access Road project, and basically that job was to build an access road deep into the Haiku Valley so they could do the tunneling work as well as the bridge work that eventually became H-3.

So that was my first job. Then later on Kiewit ended up doing other phases of the H-3 project, including two segments of the freeway on the Halawa side of the tunnel, and some other miscellaneous projects on the H-3.

Q: What about vertical projects in Hawaii; what might those be right now?

A: We do all kinds of work vertically, from renovation work to new construction, but a couple notable ones right now would be the Kapolei Elementary School, a brand new school that we’re doing as a design-build project for the Department of Education. We’re also building what they call a conrack, which is basically a center for rental car companies at the airport. We’re doing a phase of work to move the rental car facilities from their current location to a temporary location so that a brand new rental car facility can be built. … Then the other project that probably would be good to mention would be Ilima at Leihano, a senior residents living facility in Kapolei that we’re building for the Kisco Co.

Q: Didn’t you do the Trump Tower?

A: In the past we were in a joint venture that built the Trump Tower (in Waikiki), but in terms of downtown, Kakaako, all that high-rise stuff, we’re not involved in any of those condo projects.

Q: Why not?

A: Some of it is, honestly, our decision to stay out of particular types of work and focus on others. I’d be lying if I didn’t say some of it we tried to get but didn’t secure it, but that’s just sort of the nature of our business. We don’t win everything we bid. And some of it we’re better suited for certain kinds of work, given the resources we currently have available.

Q: Just generally, what’s up with the construction industry around here? Is the bloom off the rose, so to speak?

A: From a construction perspective, I think it’s a very good time to be a contractor; there are still a fair number of opportunities out there. But I think the roll-out, particularly of the private sector work in Kakaako and elsewhere, has been slower than most people expected … so it’s tough as a contractor to know how to schedule your resources. … The fact that it has slowed down, that the delivery of these products has not ramped up as quickly as many thought, has created a situation where contractors, even though it’s a boom period, still have a fair amount of resources available, so they can still do more work, I think, and are still fairly hungry for work, which is helpful to owners, because they’re still getting pretty good pricing.

Q: Is this a good time for government, then, to be doing projects?

A: I think so. It really kind of depends on the projects. In Hawaii, the pinch point tends not to be in the general contracting community … but rather the subcontracting community. You know, on the mainland you might have 10, 15, 20 subcontractors that can do glazing work, or glass work, on a building. In Hawaii we might have two. And so, for roofing, or electrical work, or plumbing, any number of specialty trades, what ends up happening is the prices for those component parts for the buildings tend to rise and outstrip supply. But in other areas such as infrastructure work or highway work or public work, where you don’t necessarily need those types of specialty trades, those tend to have availability of resources, so prices tend to be competitive. So really, to the question of whether governments should continue to pursue (projects) in this period of time really, to me, the answer depends on the job.

Q: As a trustee of Kamehameha Schools, what’s the feeling there in general about the increased urbanization of Oahu, including the rail?

A: Well, you know, as a significant landholder in Kakaako, Kamehameha created a master plan for the area a number of years ago that we continue to execute on today, and that master plan calls for increased densification and housing in the Kakaako area, which is in keeping with other state plans that are out there. I think we feel like we do a good job of managing development in a prudent way. So we continue to press forward and work in accordance with our master plan.

Q: As past president of the West Oahu Economic Development Association, what is your vision for that area?

A: I think the future’s bright for West Oahu. Rail and its connection to downtown Honolulu, creating that seamless transportation line, can only help increase the connectivity between downtown Honolulu and the west side. And that’s gotta create better opportunities for people out there.

Q: You’re also chairman of the YMCA of Honolulu, right?

A: Yeah, you know, in some ways I’m a product of the YMCA. I spent summers at the YMCA, I was a junior leader. So when I had a chance to join the board, almost seven, eight years ago, I really jumped at that opportunity. … Then a year or so ago they asked me if I would chair the board, and so in a moment of weakness I agreed to do that. (Laughs)

Q: What are some of the things they do for the community?

A: Oh, gosh, we have thousands of kids every year. We do programs at the Y. We operate a number of A+ sites around the state. We do programs for senior citizens, for working people — we have many different wonderful things that we do for the community.

Q: And you’re also a trustee for Island Pacific Academy in Kapolei?

A: My younger daughter attends IPA and Kiewit actually built both buildings on their campus, so I have good reason to be involved. With nearly 500 students in pre-K to 12th grade, IPA is doing an outstanding job.

Q: Where do you find the time to do all this stuff?

A: My stuff? (Laughs) You know, a wise person told me a long time ago that everybody is busy tomorrow, most people are busy next week, but very few people are busy a month from now, so if you can plan and schedule yourself, you can get a lot of things done. Plus I’ve found over the years that it’s much harder to hit a moving target, so I try to stay busy. (Laughs)