HYATT REGENCY A P3 SUCCESS STORY
By / Robin Brunet The Hyatt Regency Portland at the Oregon Convention Center has been credited as a successful public-private development partnership and an award-winning hospitality center piece. Notably, it was an example of how good labormanagement relationships can help a team surmount technical hurdles and get complex work done on time and on budget. SMACNA member General Sheet Metal (GSM) was tasked with fabricating the $224-million facility’s exterior metal panels in its Clackamas shop, and its success was contingent upon deploying a talented team of sheet metal workers at a time when the workforce was difficult to muster. “We benefitted from collaborating with Local 16 to get 12 » Partners in Progress » www.pinp.org
this job done as smoothly as possible,” says GSM’s Chief Executive Officer Carol Duncan. “By far the biggest challenge was that the project was underway at a time when manpower was extremely tight; there were no people in the hall, and we needed a large volume of reliable workers on the site.” Local 16 stepped in by actively recruiting new members for the project, and as a result, the Hyatt crew jumped from 150 people to about 250. “Equally important, Local 16 set up a specialized training session for the new recruits to ensure they were fully knowledgeable about the installation process for one of the panel types,” Duncan says. While the business agents that helped GSM with the Hyatt
