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Business Journal PO Box 510 Salisbury, MD 21803-0510
The Regional Chamber Newsletter
Vol. 12 No. 12
Dedicated to the Principles of Free Enterprise
July 2009
Commercial construction industry preparing for a brighter tomorrow By Carol Kinsley
Building Trades Profiles of businesses in-
volved in the building trades are found on pages 14-16
SPOTLIGHT
If it needs to be printed, Darrell and Andrea Fearin and their team can help you out. See this month’s Member Spotlight.
Page 7
FIRST JOB
Robbie Raffish of a.s.a.p.r. learned a lot about the work ethic in her first job with a major restaurant chain.
Page 10
HEALTH
The Peninsula Regional Medical Center Foundation achieves its $15 million campaign goal thanks to some generous contributors.
Page 22
There’s a glimmer of hope in the construction industry as housing starts, nationwide, inched a little higher in May, compared to April — up 16 percent — but May starts were 6.2 percent lower than the same period in 2008, according to Reed Construction Data. Palmer Gillis of Gillis Gilkerson Inc. of Salisbury said he feels we may have hit bottom. “It’s not getting worse. Right now, it’s steady. I just hope the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t a freight train!” Gillis Gilkerson’s work is commercial and industrial, rather than residential, and that’s an extremely challenging area at present, Gillis said. “There are a limited number of projects due to a slowdown in the market as a whole.” Competition is stiff, he added, with more people in the market scrambling “for whatever morsel they can find.” Gillis plans to continuing nurturing the company’s existing customers while garnering new ones. Financing is a major problem for the construction industry today. If a project can’t get financing, construction will be cancelled. Strained state and local budgets are bringing cutbacks or delays in public construction projects. Ernest W. Olds, a principal and vice president with Becker Morgan, an architectural firm founded in Salisbury in 1983, said “things are as bad as I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been in this business for five years.” Olds continued, “There are always pockets of optimism. Some companies are doing better than others. For bigger contractors and design firms, there’s no question [business] is down, and down substantially. We were in a real robust
Shown is a 3D rendering of the interior of the James M. Bennett High School, courtesy of Becker Morgan Group, which is providing architecture, civil engineering, surveying, interior design and landscape design for this project.
area, and there’s still robust demand, but almost every component is affected [by the recession], especially in the residential sector. People are not building, not buying, not selling.” Home foreclosures are rising again since the expiration of moratoriums on foreclosures, dropping hundreds of thousands of homes on the resale market to compete with new homes. There is hope for commercial construction businesses as contracts are offered for projects in the stimulus pack-
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age, which includes highway, bridge and water and sewer projects. Mark Purcell, business development manager and project executive at Nason Construction Inc., said his company, which has begun a new focus on federal and military work, is looking closely at the stimulus plan. “As we understand it, there is a very large rush to get funding. Most agencies are competing for grants. It will be interesting to see, once they get grants, how construction rolls out.” Continued to page 13