CAPITAL UNCERTAINTY COVID-19 Accelerates Some Projects, Puts The Brakes On Others BY ANDREW TELLIJOHN LaGuardia Gateway Partners announced in June that the first phase of its LaGuardia (LGA) Terminal B project – a $5.1 billion project redeveloping one of the nation’s over-capacity and under-cared-for airports – was completed and open. The completion of the Arrivals & Departures Hall for the new Terminal B, where departing passengers check-in and pass through security to a new collection of post-security food and retail or arrivals pick up their baggage and head for their destination, meant that 80 percent of this project was finished. COVID-19 had some impact on the project. There were challenges, for example, with regulations changing on the fly. “It’s one thing to work to the building code and the regulations that you knew were on the books,” says George Casey, chair and CEO of Vantage Airport Group and director of the LaGuardia Gateway Partners board. “It’s another when new things come into place that are events that were unforeseen.” But he credited the experience and flexibility brought to the project by Vantage and its partners, who were able to keep workers safe and construction largely unimpeded. “[We] couldn’t keep up the exact pace we had before, but we could still keep generally on track with nominal interruption,” he says “COVID set us back a matter of weeks, but not multiple months.”
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Accelerating Projects LaGuardia Gateway Partners unveiled phase one during a time when travel was down more than 90 percent across the country. While most of the news across aviation through the second quarter of 2020 was bleak, some airports kept plowing forward with infrastructure investments to set themselves up for the future. Nobody wanted to see the industry’s traffic drop dramatically, but many of the airports that have chosen to keep moving forward on infrastructure projects have been able to speed up portions, simply because managing heavy traffic flow has been largely taken out of the equation. That was true for Vantage when it was completing the first phase at LGA. “There were circumstances where lower traffic levels allowed us to work through construction, logistics, operational and management issues,” he says.
Right: LaGuardia Airport Partners recently unveiled the Arrivals & Departures Hall for the new Terminal B at LGA. COVID-19 slowed progress, but the ability to work with few passengers around kept the project close to its original timeline.
