Tyndall Air Force Base Hurricane Michael Recovery Industry Day #3

“Panel Construction Logistics”
Panel Discussion Construction Logistics (PART 1 of 2)
(AECOM, Bechtel, KBR, Turner)

Industry Day is a collaborative effort where senior military and business leaders come together to discuss innovations and the future of Tyndall Air Force Base and the impact to the community. We realize there is no better way to rebuild Tyndall AFB without a partnership that includes both the local community and Industry. This is our third Industry Day in what we hope will be a series of exchanges to help identify innovative ways to move forward as we rebuild Tyndall together. On behalf of the Air Force we are pleased that you have taken time away from your busy schedules to assist us with the rebuild at one of the Air Force’s most important bases in its inventory.

Industry Day was held at Florida State University – Panama City’s Holley Academic Center, Panama City, Florida

Transcript

Welcome back, we’re about to start our panel discussion with large construction companies. Each panelist will give a 20 minute presentation. So following all of the presentations, we’ll again open up the floor to your questions. And you’ll see we’ve got our panelists in place right now and I’d like to introduce a few of them. We’ve got Vern Keuhn from AECOM. He’s the executive vice president and general manager of AECOM. Am I saying that right, AECOM? AECOM, Federal Construction Services and AECOM Tishman. We also have Tony Giordano of Bechtel. He’s a senior project manager and business development manager for Bechtel’s nuclear security and environmental business unit. Also is Max Lobedo of KBR. Mr. Lobedo is the vice president of national security programs for KBR government services. Tyse Hudson of Bectel. He’s the southeast federal account manager and 22 year veteran of Turner Construction and has been involved in numerous MILCOM projects. At this time, the presentations will start and who’d like to kick that off? Mr. Kuehn.

Morning everybody. Okay, so this is a great opportunity. First, as a representative for, I may work for AECOM, but really up here making a presentation on behalf of everybody that’s in the audience and so hopefully I’m gonna cover some issues and address some issues and bring up some challenges that all of you are gonna have and maybe all of you are gonna want to talk about. So let’s begin with that. So first, thank you to the military for the opportunity to talk to the group and then secondly, on behalf of AECOM, thank you to the rest of the groups and the organizations that are in the audience for speaking for you and with you guys to bring up some challenges about the project. With Tyndall, overcoming some of the challenges that we’ve got is gonna be the primary. We’ve got a huge opportunity in front of us and a lot of work in front of us to get put in place in a very short period of time, as you all saw on the schedules at the presentation earlier. One of those things and it was brought up earlier, the quantity of skilled craftsmen and workforce that is in the area and that’s the one issue I’m gonna talk about, but then also couple that with where do you put all the additional workforce that’s gonna be coming into the market? It’s already a challenged area for housing and for other issues, so what do we do with them? So we want to present some ideas to give you to chew on and to think about how we handle that and how it’s worked in industry and other bases around the world, around the country. And then as I have time, luckily the timekeeper’s not in here, so guys, I’ll take up the whole time. Oh, there he is, there he is. Did your clock start already? Okay, alright, first one I want to bring up is an opportunity we’re involved in with Corp of Engineers, Mosul Dam project in Iraq. It’s a project that just by geography and just by control, it utilized camp housing. All skilled craft, all supervisory craft, all lived within the camp. The camp provided food, housing, shelter, and for whatever need that the workers needed. The second example I put up there from our experience, from my experience is NAVFAC, Guantanamo Bay facilities where again, all craft, supervisory staff, live in a camp, live in the facility, they have vehicles and they have ways of being able to get from the camp to their certain project through the gate is another example that we can got through in additional detail and we can work through as an opportunity that might apply here. And then with AFCEC specifically, with KEWR facility in Saudi, that we’re involved in being the construction manager for AFCEC. There’s two contractors that are involved in that facility. It was the contractors responsibility as part of the project to build camp housing for their project and that again will continue as more projects, more opportunities come along, it’ll get reused and used in future. So those are three examples I wanted to bring forward from a personal and from a professional standpoint that have been a great success and might have some lessons learned or application in the scenario that we have here. Okay, we talked about and was presented earlier already about some of the strategic placement of Tyndall Air Force Base. It has a very strategic location, we learned that already. But there’s challenges that go along with it too. What are we, 200 miles from Tallahassee? We’re 250 miles from Birmingham, I believe, and about 200 miles from Mobile. So there’s not a metro area that can draw upon a significant amount of craft in order to do the project and execute the project. It’s not centrally located, it’s not located directly in with the base. So we’re gonna have to go out to other parts of the country in order to draw craft, get travelers, and have some folks the TDY type of assignment. So those are the challenges that go along with it and I’ll touch on another point that was brought up earlier. What do you do with commercial traffic? Do you have one way in, one way out? Turns into a bottleneck. It’s gonna be a challenge. I’m gonna talk about that real briefly and what we think might be a solution to that issue. I was gonna spend some time on this slide about how the work was gonna go, but you guys have already gone through that this morning, so I’m not gonna spend a whole lot of time there. Everybody sees what the geography of the facility is, which is a challenge of its own and it seems like the plan to package the projects and have the contractors responsible for the management and execution of the project in each one of their zones, seems to make sense from an industry standpoint. But again, the craft, where we put them, and the logistics of getting people in and out is gonna be a significant challenge. Alright, so we’ve got, I want to bring up two locations that seem to make the most sense to us as a location for potential camp housing. First one being down here, I believe this is Schole housing area, is an opportunity for us to utilize. It might be a future use for the benefit to the government in developing a little bit more of that property and utilizing it as a potential camp housing. And then the other point is up here is a great opportunity, we believe, for camp housing but also I would bring up another alternative item to think about is potentially this area. This area here, I think, has some potential for development. Maybe there’s an opportunity to utilize a developer in the local area, working with another small business, local involvement in the development of this area here for future use and for the benefit to the government and to others who are visiting the facility in lieu of living but staying across the bridge. Maybe there’s an opportunity there, something to think about. Being a P3 type of delivery or something that includes development, construction, design, and operate and maintain for the military. And then the other primary point I mentioned, was I wanted to talk about is probably the choke point of the whole project is gonna be the primary gate into, the security gate onto the campus. So let’s talk about that here. So again, I’ve got the Sabre housing here, Schole up here, and then the, it’s a little fuzzy, sorry about that everybody. The security access here. Now there’s not a lot that you can do other than developing another lane of highway here to get commercial traffic off to the side, but maybe we think there’s an opportunity here with the space here, to do something similar to what’s been done at Fort Meade, at some other places where there’s an alternative route for commercial traffic to queue and stage while they get reviewed and passed through the gate, okay? That’s an option that we want to bring forward for you to think about as well. That would probably cause and would be a good thing for us to figure out whether there’s an alternate pathway once you get through the queuing for commercial traffic. How do we get them from here back over to highway 98? So back to where the primary work is and to be able to access going through here. But at least we’re getting some of that traffic off of the primary choke point through the gate. So I’ll go through here, what are some of the benefits of construction camps to the government? I believe there’s a significant opportunity for reduced cost. We talked about the number of craft trade folks that are in the market. The rest of everybody is gonna be travelers. So how do you manage the cost of getting the travelers down to this area? Every contractor in here has, sub-contractor, has their own policy for every trade and whatever it is, but if we can get those folks on base and have them managed on base, they become somewhat of a captive audience, right? And that’s what their focus is, benefit to the construction camps, benefit to the local communities, certainly in lieu of people driving from an hour, an hour and a half, from someplace that they would be able to find housing. They’re living in the Panama City area, they’re in the Panama City area and they’re spending money in the Panama City area. So that’s a benefit to the local community and then also taking a look to see if there’s an opportunity for a P3 model for development in that one corner spot that I mentioned. Might be something for us to consider, for you to consider, that benefits the local community, a developer in the area, local contractors in the area. Again like I said, it keeps the money in the Panama City area. Alright, while I got some time, how much time do I have? 8.5 minutes. I went through the plenty quick. A couple of other things that I wanted to bring up since I’ve got some time, the recommendation would be from our perspective that you would go with a two phase, best value selection. That would be our preference and of course, it would be great if we could have a stipend as part of the design build contractor. It definitely helps the design community to do what we need to do in order to develop a very solid price for the design build contract. I’m not saying anything that anybody doesn’t already know in the market, but if you go through and you got a designer that documents to 35% and you gotta go all the way to 100% construction documents, you’ve got a significant amount of gray area that’s not defined, not fully designed in the contract or in the documents. And so if you go low price technically acceptable, the contractor has no choice in order to get selected to go on the cheapest, least expensive end of the gray area. Versus what’s the best solution? What’s the best solution that the contractor can bring? That’s the challenge between LTPA and a design build environment versus best value in a design build environment contractors are allowed and can, with their designer, choose the best solution versus choosing the cheapest product or the cheapest least expensive model to get selected for the project because if they’re not taking that approach, their price is gonna be higher based on LTPA, they’re not gonna be selected. So that’s usually on any design build job with the government. That’s the most significant route that I’ve run into and have experience with with the US government. I mentioned design build stpiends. And then speaking on behalf of everybody, anybody in here that is not of an ilk or size of contractor that could do these things on their own. There’s gonna be a lot of joint-venturing that’s gonna be considered. There’s gonna be a lot of teaming, exclusive teaming that’s being considered. I’d ask you from the standpoint of at least on the design build solicitations to, well let me give you some background, sorry. The thought that I’ve got regarding the joint-venturing is the amount of time it now takes in order to get a joint-venture legally established and have that fully baked and ready for the qualification submission and two-step best value is very difficult, very difficult. So what I would ask you to consider is in a two-step best value, to have a team in agreement submitted with phase one and then ask for the JV agreement in phase two. That allows industry to do a better job of selecting partners, getting their joint-ventures established just because of the amount of time that it takes in order for industry to get legalized joint-venture in place and have SAM and CAGE and the whole process well taken care of it. The other topic that I wanted to bring up too that I didn’t bring up, that I didn’t mention, is the qualifications for SSHOs and QCMs on job sites. Because of the vast amount of projects and the quantity of work that’s going in place across the country. Talk China Lake, talk Camp Lejeune, Tyndall, and everything else that just the military construction that we’re all pursuing and working on. The quantity of QCMs and SSHOs that can meet the ever increasing qualifications for those positions on the project, those people are few and far between. It’s very difficult to get there. Typically, if they are, if they have that qualification and due to the degree requirements that are put in a lot of the solicitations, they’re designers and they want to be designers. They don’t want to go out on a job site and manage and execute and control construction. So I would on behalf of everybody here, I would present that a craft worker, a craft worker who’s been in the industry and has come up through the craft is equally if not more qualified than a four-year degree QCM or safety or whatever the case may be for those positions. Those guys have a very high level of quality and expectation and experience that you can’t even get in a four-year degree. So I’d present to you that that is an equally if not more qualified person to be a QCM than just saying hey, somebody’s got to be a four-year degree to be a QCM. The other point that I would make also is that we’re seeing some solicitations where the qualifications for project experience have to fit within a, five years ago, they had to have done a project very similar or exactly like and sometimes we run into situations where that project or like project hasn’t been done in 10 years. So again, it’s very difficult to have fully qualified people as QCMs or SSHOs or even project managers, superintendents, because of the amount of work that’s going on not only with MILCOM but also in the commercial market that we’re all working in as well. So there’s lots of opportunities, people are getting spread thin and our craft and our supervisory staff are getting spread thing as we pursue more work and now we’ve got some very significant opportunities with the US government that we all want to be a part of and we all want to do a great job for. So that’s the last point that I’ll bring up. So again, thank you very much for the opportunity to talk to all of you and hopefully I represented all of you very well in industry and look forward to having some questions here in a little bit. Thank you. (audience applauding)

Alright, next up we have Tony Giordano with Bechtel, he’s a senior project manager and business development manager for Bechtel’s nuclear security and environmental business unit.

Good morning, I’d like to thank the leadership for inviting us and allowing us to come and speak and share some of our experiences and hopefully it benefits us here. So I am with Bectel, I’ve been with Bectel for 38 years. So a lot of my experience and all that comes from that background. However, I tried to approach this presentation discussion from a Tyndall standpoint. What will Tyndall need to go ahead and do to mobilize, put together workforce and things? So I’ll refer to some of my experience, but really, I think any of us up here or others will have to go and consider some things when developing the program here at Tyndall. And then also listening to some of the risks that Tom had brought up and some of the actions and some of the questions. Potentially I’ll touch on some of that here and add some insight possibly to that. Okay, so my discussion is gonna be on mobilization of the workforce. A little bit overlapping some of the discussions but you can’t be a big contractor without thinking through the mobilization workforce housing and the global supply chain. How do we keep feeding the people that are here and make them productive? The first part may seem obvious but I’ve seen projects where they didn’t do enough up front planning when they’re starting their mobilization. So typically, you’re gonna have a mobilization team that will come together and you need to work with key stakeholders. The key stakeholders in this case would be the Tyndall PMO, you got the Army Corp of Engineers from doing their contracts, you’re gonna have the contractors who are involved but also it’s very critical that we involve the local community and the authorities. Part of involving them is one, it’s the right thing to do but two, we’re gonna be changing their landscape. We’re gonna be bringing in a lot more people, we’re going to be bringing in hazards through the highway systems and other things, so we need to have them, let them participate in the discussions. You’re still in a hurricane zone here, so there’s evacuation processes that have to take place that may need to change traffic patterns all based on the workforce and how we start to mobilize. So part of that ought to be part of the planning structure that we have. We need to make sure before we jump too quickly that our infrastructure’s ready to handle the on load of craft and people that will come onboard. Construction access areas, we talked a little bit about that. Where’s the best location? How do you access that? You’ll see down there on the list a little bit, you got ongoing mission. How do you not become a hazard to the ongoing mission and the ongoing mission not be a hazard to your construction? So all that has to be well thought out. Your security, how do you get in and out and everything else from the security standpoint. Because you’ve got to have that plan in place and really thought out and challenge ourselves to make sure it’s good before we start bringing on potentially thousands of new employees here to the site. Okay, once we go through that, we will go ahead and start now to develop the mobilization and there’s a hairiness, that you’re adhering to schedule, there’s the F-35s that are coming, the readiness and things going on there. But we want to realize it’s gonna be a rapid build up because up front is gonna use up a lot of time when it’s still in the design development and your approvals and all that, so you get to the construction and terry up on things. But we need to be organized, we need to go back to that plan we just talked about, make sure that we tested it, follow it, adjust if need be, and then execute to that plan. It’s the best thing that’s gonna happen for all of us, especially if we’re gonna have multiple contractors on site. We have an organized way of dealing and incorporating all those organized contractors. For getting resources, we’re gonna target the local area. But as Vern mentioned, this area’s quickly going to not be able to support. So we’re gonna go outside of the area and I got a map later on I’ll show you to try to describe that a little bit. The other thing I want to highlight up there is the onboarding process. People just can’t walk onto Tyndall and do work. There’s gonna be that they have to go through an HR process, they’re gonna have to go through a security process, a training process, a development process. I’ve seen in my experience, projects that have gotten delayed because when the people showed up, they just weren’t capable of handling getting several hundred people a day, maybe even more, coming onto site. So that needs to be stood up, it needs to be ready in order to receive them. The housing and things, we’ll talk about a little bit more, having that in place. Develop site specific training including safety and quality expectations. One of the things we need to do, again, those of us up here and others in the audience that have worked at large mega projects or programs, you really can have a situation where company A over here, it’s safety standards is maybe not fully acceptable or as rigid as company B over here. From a craft standpoint, they start to get confused on why do I dress this way, PPE when I’m doing work for Tony, or dress this way when I’m doing work for John Doe over here? So you want to have a standard approach to how we work the site. So it may be individual contracts, but the best that we can, we want to standardize what people see when they come to Tyndall and how they do work at Tyndall on things. We get into the deployment and I’m gonna hit the last bullet here, a statistic that’s pretty concerning. Just to give you the effort that’s there. Continuing recruitment. So for every 1000 craft that we want to have here for a year we have to hire about 2700 craft. That’s a 2.7 to one. So it’s not a one time I recruited and I mobilized, it’s an ongoing effort to recruit and bring people on and people leave for various reasons. Be it personal reasons, be it the job pays a more cents more down the street, or they no longer become qualified or fit for duty and are released. So it’s a whole slew of things that goes on when it comes to the craft. So that’s a big recruitment and we’re gonna see in another slide talk about what do we do to try and retain them to try to minimize that transfer of people? Okay, we also agreed that you’re gonna need to have some type of full service camp here and maybe in different locations. It gets a little bit more complicated when you have multiple contracts that are gonna go on, how do you do that? One possibility we talked at another site, maybe the government goes ahead and establishes the camp and then therefore gives that to the contractors, a part of the contractor comes up. There’s a lot of benefits to that. I think it would actually save costs in the long run. But you’re gonna have to have a full service camp. But camp’s not the only answer, matter fact, some of the craft don’t prefer to be in camps, depending on who they are. So you have other alternatives possibly, temporary housing units could be done and they basically bring in their own trailers or whatever at a park and come in and we can rent land or whatever. Have that established for them as needed. They’re more comfortable in their own settings so to say. Local community and development, can we help the rebuild? ‘Cause again, part of our responsibility is gonna be to help the local community here. Help it get back on its feet, help it rebuild. So should we do something to partner with some of the local communities and in return, we get a certain amount of units in which we could house people for at a certain cost. That gives us some stability in our estimates and helps the community for that. The other thing is transportation hubs. Depending on the work, some of the crafts, whatever, may be here for short periods of time. So could we establish and we have successfully, a transportation hub maybe that’s 30 minutes, 45 minutes away, the housing situation could be a little different. You bring in buses or whatever down to Tyndall Air Force Base, it helps reduce the traffic flow that comes in, the hazards that come along with the transportation and there are some of things that we can consider. And then the last thing right there I’ll touch with is remote or alternative locations. So we’ve been exploring, not just for Tyndall but in the industry, can we have prefabricated housing? There are companies out there that will do reinforced, prefabricated housing. It comes in much larger sections and then it can be assembled here very quickly. They are qualified, it can meet size requirements, and wind requirements, and all. So what’ve we done now is taken the stress off of Tyndall and put it into a remote location somewhere. Have that work done and then have it brought here to the site. So that helps do a couple things. You’re building your product in a control environment but it takes some of the stress off of Tyndall and the local area that’s here. And then again, work with local authorities for the change of conditions, just so they’re aware of when, who’s gonna be here. You’re in the middle of hurricane season right now, if you had to evacuate if the recent storm had taken a different path. Thank god it didn’t, but you would have maybe had to evacuate, that type of thing. So you got to be aware of that coming up. Okay now, we’ve gotten past that part, we get to resourcing. There’s larger companies like up here on stage, we do a lot of our own labor force research. Who’s available? Where, what craft? Type stuff. It’s a little misleading when you think about there’s 100 craft that might be available here in Panama City. Is it the right craft? Is it the right people? Are they available? What’s their work history and things? So we do those studies to find out who’s available. We also have the opportunity and I use Plant Vogtle only because that’s my experience. SO Plant Vogtle’s coming down, it’s up in Georgia. It’s a large nuclear facility. That timing is coming down. About the time that Tyndall will be ramping up. It’s not the end-all solution, but there is some good talent that can come from those facilities. That’s not the only on in the area, there’s other facilities in the area that we need to make sure that we’re communicating with to say hey, okay here’s the timing. ‘Cause if not, those people start to go elsewhere. So you find out, okay, here’s the timing, here’s what we’re doing, this is gonna be what we think the craft labor mix is gonna be. So they can start encouraging some of the people at those other site to be ready to think about coming down here and doing work here. We want to also ensure that the qualifications and the skills. One of the concerns that I would have as a large company is I’m bringing on a lot of people. Now typically, we’ll have a good selection of people that we have history with that have been around with the company for a long time. But you’re also picking up some new labor, some new crafts and things. Are they qualified? Just because they can hold a hammer, we don’t necessarily need them here in this environment and potentially becoming a harm to themselves or to others. So there’s a lot of certification programs that are out there. There’s nationally recognized certification processes that says okay, if he’s a welder, he’s a certified welder and we can prove it. If he’s a sheet metal worker, he’s a certified sheet metal worker and we can prove it. So we want to make sure we’re vetting the people that are coming here are truly capable of doing their craft and capable of working in this environment. We’re going to be competing with resources. I’ll show it out in slide seven here in a second. So we need to, like I mentioned before about that retention part, you got 2.7 to every one, but you can help if we can get people who want to stay here longer. So we need to build the desire to work at Tyndall. So people want to work here and be here for a longer duration to help rebuild Tyndall. So part of that is the optimum living conditions. If we do do a camp, make sure it’s a full service camp. Make sure that they have the conveniences that need. Again, there are people that had the life-work balance, that has to happen. Then we had the safe work environment. People want to work where it’s safe. They want to know when I went in, the people around me I can trust, the policies, the management, the leadership, practice good safe behaviors, and I’ll go home in the condition that I came in. We want to also develop that. We want to develop them not just for here but that they can grow and learn. They’ll go to next site and they feel that there’s a benefit for being here at Tyndall. And then finally, the compensate. It’s always going to be compensation competitive and that may not only be the salaries that we pay, but the per diem and other benefits that they get if they stay for a longer period of time. Maybe there’s a slight bonus or something in there for them in order to help that retention. We look at the bigger picture of what it costs to change people. It’s worth sometimes paying people a little bit extra if they stay on board. Okay, so this is something to think about as well. So this is a picture of the United States, I know it’s hard to see it, but the dots there, just quickly touching base, is what would be some of the competition that we’re gonna have here rebuilding Tyndall? So I’m gonna go counterclockwise. In the bottom right, it’s the recent hurricane that just went through doing the damage to the Bahamas. You can see that there’s gonna be tremendous rebuild even though that’s not a US territory. The work there and things are still gonna be a draw to go work that. If we go up a little bit, in Georgia, in South Carolina, I’m sorry. I’m sorry it’s on a Georgia border. You have this Savannah River site, they got a MOX facility there. It’s a multi-billion dollar facility there. The government is repurposing that facility. So they’re gonna take it and they’re gonna change it into a different purpose, but it’s gonna require a lot of craft. It’s gonna require a lot of people to go there and that’s gonna come up over the next couple years for that activity. You’ve got Camp Lejeune and Cherry Point. Again, severely damaged, looking for similar craft and resources we have there. You go up to the top there, you’ll see a Y-12 processing facility. I’m very familiar with that one, that was my background before and that is a $6.5 billion facility, but it’s going under roof. There’s three large buildings there that will be under roof shortly. So a lot of your electricians, your pipefitters, your hangar work, your equipment, everything, is gonna go up and be challenged to go up in that area. If I keep going around, it was mentioned earlier about the flooding that occurred up there in Nebraska. It has to be rebuilt. And then finally, if I swing around, we got China Lakes, that got devastated with the earthquakes on July 4th and July 5th, which did a tremendous amount of damage. So even though it’s over in California, it’s still in play when you’re trying to take key resources, talented resources and going over there. So the circles that I have would be where would we target to get our craft? And when I say craft, it’s also non-manual. We’ll need the inspectors that we talked about, we need the construction management teams, we need some of the field engineers and everything else. So it’s both craft and non-manual. So obviously, we like to do that locally the best that we can and I spent yesterday and riding around, you can see the area’s pretty damaged, pretty beat up. There’s a lot of competition to rebuild there. So the local community is going to be limited. The next area I’d like to look at would be the southeast. Primarily, obviously for logistics it’s close, people can get here and work from the southeast standpoint. But also, those people are familiar with what it takes to work in an environment like Florida. So you have lightning storms, you’ve got heat, you’ve got other type of situations they’re familiar with. So that would be the primary target areas we would have. And then the other bubble show where potentially we can do some remote location and do some work from there. Okay, global supply chain. The other thing, there’s a lot on this slide, I’m not sure how I’m doing with time? Four minutes, okay. So I’ll gonna mention here is that there’s a lot of work that can be with local supply chains. We can start pre-qualifying suppliers. If we know we’re gonna buy a lot of steel, we can negotiate with them about the tonnage. We may not know the design of things but we can start to do that. So there’s a lot of things that we can start to do up front with the local supply chain. Plus also, these people are just sitting around waiting for something to happen. They got a lot of work coming up. So as soon as we can get in the queue and let them know that hey, here’s our schedule, here’s our timeframe, here’s about the size that we’re getting. They can start to look at if they got to do any retooling, if they got to do any additional staff hiring, they get ready to support a program we have like this, so we need to reach out to them. And this encompasses everything. Digital supply chain systems. All this is is a fancy way of saying is that we’ve now become electronically able to deal with once we’ve selected our suppliers, to communicate to them when we’re gonna need things, if we’re having some quality issues, if we have changes, whatever. It’s done digitally through a supply chain. Also, we like our suppliers to retain some of the material if there were places if possible and take some of the burden of the site. This is this electronic way of communicating through some of that. We talked here and I think there’s a great opportunity to use some of the off site fabrications, the housing, the hangar work, let that be done remotely and then have it brought here on site. There’s a lot of benefits from that. There’s a lot of control that can come from that. It also allows us to reach further into the national workforce, a job there for those, and you can see the different ways of being able to bring that on. I’ll hit on here, Tyndall is fortunate where you have rail spur system that comes in. I think we need to maximize that the best we can. We need to use the barging system that comes in, and then trucking. So real quick, I’ll just jump back. When I was at the UPF project, it’s landlocked. It’s a fixed footprint. So in the evening, we supplied our main lay down areas and off-peak hours, that’s how everything was brought in and supplied. And then during the day, the craft and the construction teams would go get it from there and bring it in. So there is a way of coordinating that and staying less of a risk to the ongoing traffic and the community that’s there. So a couple things where I think the program, I’m not sure who that is, a PMO, but I’ll just say the program. I’m looking at safety protocols across the site that they’re consistent, looking at a quality program that’s across the site that’s consistent. And then there’s a couple things, the second and third from the bottom. Risk mitigation, we ought to work in a larger contractual environment all of us talk about, ’cause it is Tyndall and again, I’m looking at this as an overall program. How can we all work together to do the risk mitigation? And then change control and route cause analysis. That’s something we need to share amongst ourselves as contractors so that we’re benefiting from that. I don’t need to learn something that Vern’s already learned. We can share that and improve. Again, we’re looking at Tyndall as a program. What’s best for Tyndall? And therefore, as much information we can share, the better we have. Anyway, I’ll close maybe a few seconds early, but thank you very much for the opportunity to talk to you. (audience applauding)

Alright, next brief is Max Lobedo from KBR. Mr. Lobedo is the vice president of national security programs for KBR government services.

Great, everybody hear me alright? I’m very low voiced. Alright, I’m not a constructor, I’m a logistician. So I’m in the wrong room maybe but maybe not. So I’m gonna take through a few things and I’m gonna use think of meatloaf and ketchup. The slides are the meatloaf, I’m gonna be the ketchup. If you don’t like ketchup, just hold the analogy in your head. (laughing) Anyway, so kind of what happened here, I gotta keep an eye on my timer here. I was asked, let’s put it very recently, to come down and kind of take look one, at what Tyndall is doing and secondly, kind of the timing and just give my thoughts. But not necessarily at KBR but as a logistician. I happen to work for KBR. But anyhow, let’s go to the first slide. I’m gonna key on that top bullet and I’m gonna talk kind of sense it within 20 minutes. Kind of how to think of this as opposed to things you need to think about in a normal contractual community. So in 2023, I believe, you’re gonna have to have F-35s based here. F-35s are a platform, isn’t an installation, an extension of the platform in the air. And it’s an all integrated sequence type of thing. So that’s kind of how I approached this. So I kind of think approach, the eventual rebuilding of Tyndall as a product, not as a construction contract. So I think of this completely different. So a few things there. This is how we understand it, there’s a number of facts here that I think are apparent to everybody, so I’m not gonna go through each bullet. But that top one is the key one. This is a product, it’s not necessarily a construction project. So if you were gonna take the design, the implementation, the studies, the integrative logistics support that went behind the building, the fielding, and now the sustainment in the F-35, that’s kind of what you’re looking at, but this is one component of the overall platform, at least in my view. Some examples, they’re all look about similar. Constructors do it, logistics companies do it. Our term is man camp, construction camp, I personally like workforce facilities, but they wouldn’t let me put it on the slide. And just kind of an overview I’d like to talk about a minute here. So right now, if you looked at housing, I got like a ream of stats that I kind of looked through yesterday. Right now, if you were to take Panama City just at the end of this and kind of going into 2020, can probably absorb about 850 right now. If looking at the workload estimate, you probably got about 12 to 1500, that will fluctuate as the project goes on, I’m sure, but there I come to some numbers and some of the, I guess, operations I’d like to talk about here a minute at the bottom of the chart. So one of the big questions that kind of came up is, I took a look at this, is some of the advantages and disadvantages. (audience member faintly speaking) Yeah, I warned you up front. (audience member faintly speaking) Okay, how’s that? You know, one time I was actually briefing something and I had this thing like right here, but that’s much better isn’t it? Alright, but number one, when you put a worker facility on, value occurs closest to the customer. So when you look at where you’re gonna put a temporary worker facility or worker facility, it has to be where it’s gonna be a best value to Tyndall, the end customer. So it’s going to kind of be, I’m not gonna say it needs to be here or put up a map, it’s gonna be very Tyndall proximate and that is because you have a schedule, you have a construction schedule. So everything logistically is gonna impact that schedule. So if you put a facility away from where the value is going to occur, and finishing with that platform, you’re going to get into some, I call it little nicks, time nicks in that schedule that have to do with personnel material, that you’re gonna consistently gonna hit, that’s gonna extend the project. Kind of a second thing there, it is a lower cost. So kind of that initial point, your productivity increases once you do that facility with its value occurring closest to the customer, a couple phased billed and it is, I think somebody mentioned it before, it kind of needs to be full service for a number of reasons. One, you go to the schedule and it’s a product. You’re on a schedule, it’s gotta be there. That F-35’s gonna land on that date in 2023 and everything’s got to be set. So what you kind of have to have there to increase that productivity is a full human services around it. At the bottom, ideally near or adjacent to Tyndall. You know, to set a location, the main driver is when I was listening to earlier briefings that I think totally define where that facility goes, that’s environmental, cultural, and natural matters and that’s only going to be in coordination with Tyndall where that can be determined. There are a number of good sites that I looked at yesterday that could be pointed out. Sorry, I clicked too far. Some of the benefits. Lower cost is one, productivity, I mentioned, that traffic congestion flow is key. I drove, many of you probably already have up and down 98, kind of goes right into Tyndall on some of the ancillary roads. One of those little nicks that affect schedule and have to do with resources and people, that’s part of it. It’s the commute, we experience that everyday, many of us do. The little nicks that come against your schedules, your productivity increases, you don’t have the commute so to speak. Security concerns, badging officers can be running in conjunction with this and the other thing that kind of comes up, local business and I guess our many numbers of small businesses out there, this concept and we look at logistics and integration, I’m gonna explain why in a minute, but it just takes that all in. Big company but highly depended, at least what I’m thinking in my head, logistics and integration is part of this, to be very important. And then they’re called challenges. These are kind of questions that could come up again. We talked about location. The big one and I actually spent a lot time, so if you have 12 to 1500 personnel in a facility on Tyndall, is the address that security and emergency response and kind of I were to look at this temporary facility for our workforce that’s building the product, I would look at it and take all the side off of a hotel and think what hotels provide. Well that security comes embedded as part of that. The emergency response will have to be probably coordinated with the local community, but also the immediate emergency response can be right there. Fire response is obviously going to be a larger part of the community. Codes and requirements kind of came up in some of the discussions I had. It’s the standard codes for human inhabitants of where they’re living as they work. So you can’t think of combat zones, you’ve got to think in terms of the right codes that keep recruiting and retention in place, but that build the product and it’s proximate to where the value needs to occur. Some of the other matters or agreements, legal reviews, what is it if you put a contractor facility on Tyndall? Don’t know yet, we’re gonna explore that. Privatized housing and syncing those construction efforts, another one, I think that’s a part that becomes integrated. I already talked about local business growth and recovery, it’s embedded. Because I’m gonna skip the other challenges ’cause I may get a question on it. Am I like kind of good? Because I’m gonna go into the bigger picture. How many? (timekeeper speaking faintly) Oh okay, good, because that’s actually the last chart but where I want to go for a minute after taking a look at this. Again, completely fresh eyes. There’s been folks at KBR that have been involved with this, have been working on it. I saw design integration up there. No where did I see logistics integration. That’s how the strategy is being developed. We’re getting kind of close here. Contracts are already being led, so what I would pause it to you, that the logistics component of the total construction effort is integrated with the construction but yet such a separation component of it, that it needs its own integration because I think I heard, correct me if I’m wrong, 12 zones? Is that 12 different supply chains? From 12 different. You kind of go exponentially and if logistics is defined as supply stores, distribution, maintenance, personnel, and engineering, how are all of those coming together? I don’t have all the answers ’cause this is a 20 minute brief. I kind of looked this over yesterday, but the largest recommendation that I could give both combination to industry and to Tyndall is taking a look at this as an integrative logistics approach and that’s all resources, including people, which goes to why you’re probably gonna wanna put a workforce facility on Tyndall where value occurs of the nearest. I took a few notes that I’ve got the impression that folks might want to hear about that relate to logistics, supply and demand, cost increases. I kind of saw on a chart up there. That gives balance to the logistics integration. I kind of have a Home Depot picture in my mind in logistics integration, but includes the people, the hotel part of it. The roads, definitely that bridge, as previously defined, is a choke point. But to deliver your materials and those lay downs, and I keep going back to logistics integration, is going to have to be synchronized by the construction schedule or schedules. So primarily, most if not all of your transportation are gonna hear about it more, fortunately. At the end here, it’s gonna be multi-modal. It’s not gonna be a singular mode. You’re gonna have ground, there’s probably gonna be a need for efficiencies sake, again, to stay on schedule to deliver the platform. Maritime or barges, I heard, was mentioned, and also rail will come into play. The one thing I did not hear mentioned and probably can’t is aerial. But that in itself has restrictions. The other thing I got out of there kind of with the complexities within a zone, when you look at logistics integration in of itself in support of a construction or a product effort, a lot of that complexity goes away. Because it’s centralized management, decentralized execution, and if you were to think of it, at least in my mind. If you go to a Toyota plant, everything that’s happening where that Toyota is being built, is building it or constructing it. There is very little logistics going on in that plant that’s building that Toyota. There are robots, the people, but all the logistics, in this case, parts, hoods, doors, everything, is pretty much already there. The logistics integration has been done where the value needs to occur and that’s closest to where the product is eventually going to come from. And five minutes. That would actually be the biggest part I’d have to share with you. I think that it’s gonna take a temporary workforce facility or a man camp or a construction camp, to where it’s gonna go, it’s gonna be driven by a lot of factors. You just can’t say hey, there’s that old landfill. No, can you imagine just how much time it’s gonna take putting people and the landfill cleared? It’s gonna have to be examined and probably the last thing I’ll leave with ya is please consider the logistics integration in the project. I really don’t think it’s an embedded part of the construction because you’re building a product. It’s not necessarily a construction effort because Tyndall, beside being a part of the community, besides being , probably the Air Force’s contribution to our national defense, is also part of the defense platform. That’s it, I’m out. So that was the ketchup for the day. (audience applauding) I’m gonna make sure I take mine and leave somebody’s there, thanks.

Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. Next up, we have Tyse Hudson of Bectel, he’s the southeast federal account manager and 22 year veteran of Turner Construction. He’s been involved in numerous MILCOM projects.

Hello, appreciate the opportunity to talk to ya. I got a little bit of a radio voice, so hopefully that’ll come through loud and clear. I want to get to know the audience a little bit and make sure you guys are still awake out there. Get a little participation, just by asking a couple of questions. My first question, how many of you’ve been affected by the workforce shortage? Raise your hand if you’ve been affected by workforce shortage. Yeah, that’s what I figured. And number two, how many of you are here ’cause you feel good about helping the Air Force accomplish its mission? Even more hands, super. And now I’m really gonna test your honesty on this question right here. How many of you want me to be really brief ’cause I’m the last speaker standing between you and lunch? (laughs) Some hands went up really fast there. I like it, I got a good, honest audience. So again, Tyse Hudson with Turner Construction and I’m just excited to be here. Excited to be a part of the participation in this program. A lot of the challenges have already been discussed so I won’t spend a lot of time identifying additional challenges, but I will talk about some possible solutions. And maybe what the Air Force can take from this if all four of these companies are kind of in a vacuum talking about hey, we do need some kind of man power camp or RV park, whatever it may be, that would bring people, then that’s probably a good idea that we’re gonna have to incorporate that. But we’ll talk about location logistics, base logistics, area infrastructure, the national labor shortage, and operational need and speed of delivery. As we’ve talked about the challenges, we’re here in Panama City, which of course is a beautiful region to be in, which will help attract workers in this area, but it’s a big distance from a lot of the major cities and getting the man power here is not gonna be easy as the three folks before me talked about. Some options, rail or waterways, trucking, making sure that we have truck routes to get stuff here. It’s glad to hear we’re already using some boats, barges, to get stuff here. Prefabrication, in my mind, the more we can prefabricate and just show up on site and install it, then the less somebody’s gotta be staying in a hotel here. They build in a factory where it’s a well controlled environment, the quality’s super, step up, put it in place. Maybe that should be part of RP, how are you gonna prefabricate stuff due to the limited housing and stuff like that? The more prefabrication, the better, in my mind. Some other challenges, multiple concurrent construction project activities happening. I bet you the gates are pretty busy now and then, in my mind too, if we’re talking $3 billion, I would have been thinking more than 1800 workers. Really, I would think 2- or 3000 if all that work’s going at the same time, some stuff’s finishing, some stuff’s starting. So that is significant. I’m sure that’s gonna be a huge increase in the inflow through the gates. Maybe what we should consider is doing an additional construction only gate. Maybe construction only for the 12 zones, have their own little gate or whatever. So then we’re not getting in base’s way, base personnel are going through one gate, so we’re not slowing them down and also, they’re not slowing us down. Some base’s you go to and your workers are in line for an hour and then going through security. It’s a half a day before they can even show up and we want to avoid that, ’cause that just costs everybody more money. Also just thinking about we’re gonna have, so at the beginning, we’re gonna have additional workers coming through and then once stuff starts coming online, more base personnel are gonna be going out there. So it’s just more base folks are gonna be here, more construction workers, so it’s a huge potential problem to help address now. Some of the options we can also do for coordination between prime contractors, federal government, develop a plan with local officials to improve or create detours over roadways. I know we talked about 98 as our way to divert route 98 through, right now, it’s going right through the center of our base. Is there something that we can do there? We talked about the construction entrances and then additional gates. Challenges for the area infrastructure. So a lot of the infrastructure’s already been damaged. We need to make sure we have the housing that we talked about. Food service, do we have plenty of restaurants and everything, so people aren’t spending an hour going to drive somewhere else eat? And just grocery stores, gas stations. Driving around town, I’m seeing a lot of the stuff still in disrepair, so we need to make sure we have the basic necessities for people. Also, just working with developers as they talked on previously to get some housing. An RV park, housing, whatever. Maybe bring home some of the barracks early. You can put construction folks in there and later, turn it back over to the government. Maybe that’s feasible, maybe it’s not. But with our tight timeline, we’re gonna have to be thinking outside the box to make this stuff happen. Trade labor shortage. That is a huge issue, as we all know. Everybody in this room understands that. One thing I was thinking about, maybe what we can do is have an industry day for skilled workers. So we’re all here in nice clothes and talking about the stuff, which we know is important, but maybe we could talk to skilled tradesmen and women about hey, this is the military’s mission and maybe they’d be motivated to be here working on this rather than somewhere else because everybody wants to be doing something important and if they understand the Air Force’s mission and how their help can affect national security and how the quality’s got to be great and we got to finish our jobs because the nation is county on us to do that. They’re gonna stay a little bit later and they’re gonna be a little bit more excited to get there in the mornings. So if we can help make sure they understand what they’re doing, they can be proud of that. I think that’ll really be of benefit. And then just making sure we talked about making sure we’re paying our folks plenty well. Maybe we can feed ’em. I don’t know if the government can do some kind of supplemental lunches or whatever it is or housing subsidies. I know the wage rates are gonna be above Davis Bacon. And then also, is there a way to keep them connected with family and community? And I don’t know exact solution for that but we could think about that ’cause if they still feel connected, they’re gonna want to be here. So the operation readiness deadlines, as we know, they’re not moving, we got to make sure that everything’s online as the previous schedule has shown. So how can we help make that happen? And one thing we thought too was that second bullet there, develop board directors and includes all contractors as well as the Department of Defense stakeholders and program collaborators. Maybe inform some kind of board of directors that includes industry, Air Force, Corp of Engineers is involved, the local community. Everybody helping to identify problems early, that board of directors and identifying solutions so we can be successful because the contractors want to get done, they don’t want to run into issues and they want to do the job and get off site, that’s what everybody wants. And just that board of directors might help resolve unforeseen stuff quicker if stuff does come up and also see stuff further in advance. So just an idea that including local government too with that. So appreciate your time very much, thank you. (audience applauding)