Construction attracts sticky fingers

Commentary

“Look upon it as the dismantling of the middle class…. we are in the midst of the largest transfer of wealth in the nation’s history. It is a transfer from the middle class to the rich and from the middle class to the poor— courtesy of the people in Washington who rewrote the rules.”

Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele — “America: What Went Wrong”

The construction industry is one big honey pot. And when you get around honey you get sticky fingers.

McClave saw a glimpse of that when a sub contractor for the campus project allegedly was paid for work it didn’t do. McClave didn’t pay the bill. The contractor did, using the school district’s borrowed construction funds. I assume that’s being worked out.

That’s going to happen in construction. Sometimes things just disappear. Or don’t et built.

For eight years I worked for a home- builder developer and compared to the hurly burly of a big city daily, it was a dream job. Carpeting on the floor. Stained glass windows. A three-story granite former mansion that was a National Historic Site.

That was work life in a staff position at headquarters.

Out on the lines, it was a different picture.

Rolling fields and deserts in Colorado, Wisconsin, Utah and Idaho were being turned into improved lots with water, sewer and roads.

The home-building affiliate of the company was constructing homes and condominiums. (We called homebuilding an affiliate, parallel company because the main enterprise, Terracor, was already $30 million or more under water when I walked in the door. It would stay afloat for almost 10 years because it had the good fortune to be at the end of the line for the sequential bankruptcy of the developers which had been financed by the big real estate investment trusts of the 1970s.)

From just five projects, consider this track record.

The construction manager at Bloomington was fired. He had diverted construction materials from company projects to build his own dream home. Mike was a flamboyant Jewish guy with horn rim glasses and a beautiful blonde wife. He was a lot of fun to be around, always laughing.

But building a personal home for free with diverted labor and materials was like stealing from the company. A no go.

Then there was the mature, distinguished looking construction manager at the Pinery. I met him once for coffee in a restaurant and he extolled about the wonderful benefits and illumination he had received from belonging to a secret society. Looking back, of course, he was hinting I should knock on the door because it might open doors for me.

As it turned out, years later I joined a competing secret society, but my counter culture assessment of the symbolism of that fine group, and they were a fine group of men, left me empty and a little confused. Others with far broader observation skills than me have said that secret societies, though warring among themselves, seem to converge at the very top of the pyramid.

Anyway, I was shocked a few months later to learn that the distinguished gentleman was fired. Something about missing construction materials that had been paid for, or something like that. I do know that the first wave of condos at the Pinery used to lose their snow cover real fast after a storm. That’s because there was no insulation, I was told.

Bailey Creek was a different story. The affable older Mormon couple that managed it had been given permission to build a modest manager’s home on the property. Now, they had a green light to build something — but on a visit the headquarters big bosses were dismayed at how overbuild the home was. A gorgeous and huge stone fire place. Very spacious

The Bailey Creek “home” was so overbuilt it was taken over and used as a resident clubhouse instead. So this disaster was not so much outright theft, just lack of oversight and over exuberance.

But, as an aside, the stable manager’s job was abolished when it was determined a lot of saddles and tack had disappeared on his watch. But that wasn’t technically construction shrinkage.

And it’s not just the employees.

Years ago, old timers remember the early 1980s boom and then bust — which subsequently motivated the Reagan Administration to proclaim that the nation has been built and the country no longer needed as many workers as it did. This was part of their rationale for explaining the tough times that were to ensue.

With this as a background, my nuclear family purchased a very small home in Bennett, to get away from the Big City. I bought the house for something like $42,000 with a fixed rate loan just before interest skyrocketed. Eight months later, jobless, I would sell that house for an $8,000 profit. The buyer wasn’t really buying the home as much as he was the low interest rate. That was legal back then, before they invented accelerated payment due on sale clauses and the like.

But I digress. One night I heard noise and stepped outside my back door and switched on the back porch light.

I was absolutely floored to see what was happening in the construction area behind me. My porch light illuminated dozens of my fellow residents who were greedily snatching up lumber and materials from the unfinished homes and carrying them back to their homes to finish their basements or whatever. It was not unlike a disturbed anthill, there was so much stealing going on.

My faith in humanity fell to earth too that night.

But these stories are pretty tame compared to some of the construction rascals who “think big.”

I remember reading, I’m sure it was in Forbes magazine, about the New Jersey bank that agreed to finance a high-rise residential project on the ocean shore.

This was also back in the go-go ‘70s.

Every few weeks a bank executive would go out and check on the construction progress. He would be given a tour of the building as it rose into the sky.

Then he would go back to the office and approve the release of to pay the construction bills that were rolling in.

When the building was completed, and the money had all been dispersed, the banker then realized the rascals had been showing him the construction activity of another building that someone was actually constructing on an adjoining lot.

The bank had bought and paid for empty air.

You could say that all the labor and materials — absolutely all of it — had been diverted.

Construction is a honey pot.

Get around it and your fingers can get sticky.