You’ve read before in Allegro that the Local 802 building renovation has encountered many speedbumps over the last few months. Of course, it’s an axiom in the construction industry that renovations always take longer and cost more than originally planned. What we’ve experienced goes beyond that. With the sudden death of our project manager, we’ve found that essential pieces of the project were not brought to fruition. Specifically, we were given assurances all along the way that agreements were being negotiated with all the union trades to arrive at rates for our job that we could afford. This has proven not to be true. As far as we can tell, no agreements were made with the unions to cover our job. As a result, our project has been shut down since Thanksgiving. Demolition is 90 percent complete and our building is nearly gutted, but work has stopped.

We’ve been working hard since late November to fill the holes we have discovered in our planning, and we’ve decided to restructure our team. To that end, we have been interviewing a class of professionals called “owners’ representatives.” As their title suggests, these reps solely represent the interests of the client (i.e. Local 802) in terms of union relations and budget controls. After interviewing three very viable and competent candidates, we chose Erik Caiola of Resolution Real Estate Partners to take over the role of project manager and oversee the entire project, using our input as guidance and giving us much-needed assistance concerning how to best get our project back up and running. Erik came to us from a recommendation from the Central Labor Council, which used him as their owner’s rep for their gut renovation a few years ago. They highly recommended him. As we write this, we are signing Erik’s contract and will immediately begin to right this ship.

This has obviously greatly impacted our timeline. We will not be returning to the building in March as expected, and we are negotiating with our current landlord at 25 West 45^th Street for a new lease to cover us through this year.

We realize that this is not good news for any of us, but we hope to have much better news for you in the next few months.

I am happy to take your comments or questions on this topic and relay them to Local 802 leadership. My work e-mail is still scutler@local802afm.org.