Louis Coletti is a busy man. The president and
chief executive officer of the Building Trades Employers’ Association of New
York City has 27 contractor associations and 1,800 union construction managers,
general contractors and subcontractors under his umbrella. His 30 years of
experience in New York City’s construction industry was started by the
unlikeliest of catalysts—a riot in a correctional facility in New Jersey.
Coletti recently sat with Commercial Observer to discuss
the current challenges faced by BTEA members, and walked us through his career,
the heavy hitters who helped to shape it and what the true test of success is.
Commercial Observer: You have so many different
parties to answer to at the BTEA: How do you keep everyone happy?
Coletti: You should ask them if I do! I’ve been
here for 19 years, and I’ve enjoyed a tremendous amount of support from the
community. But I think part of the success of the organization is that you’re
always going to get a straight answer from me. You may not like what you hear,
but I’m going to tell you: “This is our position, and I hope we can agree. But
if we can’t, we can’t.” I’m a man of my word, and I take that very seriously.
How did you get your start in the construction
industry?
I was working in law enforcement in Union County and
going to school at night for my masters degree in public administration. I
moved up from being in the sheriff’s office to the head of criminal justice to
head of economic development. On one fateful evening, I was put in charge of a
correctional facility six hours after there was a major riot. It was your
typical overcrowded facility—built for 200 people but holding 600, no
air-conditioning and 200 years old. I remember standing on the roof watching
flames coming out of the windows. [The inmates] had 12 hostages. I was watching
state troopers charge the facility and hearing bullet shots careening off the
wall, and I said to my boss at the time, who was the county manager, “Do you
realize that we’re in charge of that building in an hour?” and he looked at me
and said, “What do you mean ‘we?’ ” I ended up running that institution
for a couple of years, and that’s how I got into construction because part of
the plan I was tasked with was building a new jail under a federal court order.
The whole place was corrupt. We heard that there was
going to be an escape attempt, and one inmate told me, “I can walk out the
front door.” Now this was a convicted rapist and murderer. He told me that the
officers left the control center when they went out for beer and pizza. I said,
“What?!” I didn’t believe him, and so he said, “Well, give me your home
number.” So I gave him it. Sure enough—he calls me up. I said, “Where are the
six officers?” He said, “I told you—they went out for beer and pizza, and I’m
in the control center.” Again, I said I didn’t believe him, and he said, “OK—listen
to this.” Then I heard him opening all of the jail cells, and there is only one
place in the institution that this could have happened. So I call the county
police, we go down and surround the facility. I hide in the back until these
six officers return. I come out of the back, I say, “Finish your beer and
pizza, punch your cards, you’re all fired.” We turned that institution
around. That established a reputation for me as “a fixer,” which
ultimately led to my appointment as the youngest county manager in the history
of New Jersey.
You went from this Union County government role to
president of the New York Building Congress in 1986. How did this come about?
I answered an ad in The New York Times. After
the interview, I came home and said to my wife, “This is a joke. This job is
lined up for someone who has all of these New York City political contacts”—but
I kept getting calls to come back. My wife went crazy when I told her I took
the job because I was being interviewed on Wall Street to go into public
finance, and she said, “I thought you told me this organization had no money!”
I told her it didn’t—but you had to sit in that room and sense the level
of commitment.
Jack Rudin [vice chairman of the board of directors at
the time] basically adopted me and led me around and introduced me. John Tishman—I remember coming out of the
interview in his office, and he said to me, “Are you sure you can get this job
done?” I said “yes, I believe I can.” He said, “Well, you better.”
Next, Peter Brennan, who was the head of labor unions at
the time came to me and said, “Can you do this job?” “Yes,” I said. “You want
it?” he asked. I replied, “yes.” And as he walks into the conference room I
hear him say to everyone, “Alright, enough with this interview stuff. We want
Coletti.”
What gave you the confidence to know that you could do
the job to their expectations?
Because I didn’t have a job at the time [laughs]. I was
unemployed, and someone who was a mentor to me said the true test of success in
life isn’t how many times you reach the pinnacle of success in your career;
it’s how you react to it when you get knocked off that pinnacle. It’s how you
get on your feet and fight your way back.
When I first came to New York, the New York Building Congress
was a social club. It was very small, but you had visionary thinkers. You had
the Jack Rudins, the John Tishmans, the George Foxes of the world who saw that
in order to have an impact on public policy you had to do more than have a
Christmas show and a golf outing.
How has the construction industry changed over the
past 30 years?
It was obviously much easier when the union industry
controlled the market, but what’s really worse is cash flow. This is a
high-risk business, and contractual terms, whether they are in the private
sector or public sector, just take risk and push that risk down. The owner
pushes it to the contractor; the construction manager pushes it to the
subcontractor. This used to be a business that was based on trust and
relationships. You shook hands on a $500 million job. Now it’s all formal and
all legal, and you need all of this documentation. Paperwork has replaced
relationships and trust. Globalization has also changed things.
What needs to change?
We’re not consolidating. I still have 27 associations;
the unions still have 56 different unions. That model doesn’t work. It’s not
efficient. For a lot of my members it’s a very difficult, emotional change to
make. Many of them are second- and third-generation owners, and it’s really
hard for them to accept change. Change is constant, but this is not an industry
built for change. Someone once said it’s like trying to turn around an aircraft
carrier. But in today’s world you don’t have that time. Not if you want to
survive
.
Another element is that you believe that labor unions
need to be more competitive with regard to pricing?
Yes. I believe there is really a value to union
construction. And not just from a real estate or construction standpoint but
from a social standpoint. At this point in time, the only blue-collar industry
that is left that can provide a middle-class living is the union construction
industry.
That’s why I push so hard against labor [unions] to
reduce their costs, and a lot of them may view me very differently than they
did before. But I do it because I want them to be successful and to thrive, and
the only way that is going to happen is if they reduce their cost and change
their business model. This would accomplish two goals—it would serve the BTEA
membership they work for, create more union jobs and help grow New York’s
middle class for a new generation of city residents.
If the union shops want to stick to the 100 percent
building model, then 100 percent of them have to change and be competitive.
There are a number of open-shop general contractor
associations that have been created. We’re having conversations with them about
possible membership. I would never have believed it five years ago. Open shops
comprise 50 percent of residential market construction.
Who have you learned the most from in your career?
Because we are such a diverse industry and the
specialties are so different, I have learned so much from so many different
people. Jack Rudin, George Fox [the chairman of Cooper Union], Peter Brennan
[former president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of New York],
Ed Malloy, Mike Bloomberg…
What did you learn from Bloomberg?
From Mike Bloomberg I learned how to be a successful
businessman. When his election came around, we had a breakfast, and he came to
it and gave a speech. He comes in, carrying a zoning book, and flings it onto
the floor. He said, “When I get elected mayor, we are going to build and not
with this [book].” We loved him, but we thought, “This guy can’t win.” Well, he
won. One night I was at a dinner when Mayor Rudy Giuliani was going out [of office] and
Bloomberg was coming in, and [both Bloomberg and Giuliani] walk past the table
I’m at and start talking to people at the table. I stick my hand out, and I
congratulate Bloomberg and say, “I’m Lou Coletti, I represent the BTEA. I’m
looking forward to working with you. I wish I could tell you I was with you,
but I wasn’t.” He starts laughing, and he says to me, “Give me your business
card because you’re the only honest man in the room.”
A couple of weeks later I’m sitting in my office, and the
phone rings and my assistant comes in and says it’s the mayor’s office. So I
pick up the phone. It was the mayor’s appointment secretary saying, “The mayor
would like to know if you and your wife Janet would be available to have dinner
at his home in two weeks.” I said, “No, really—who is this?” thinking I was
being pranked.
He would bring together 10 couples, two or three times a
week from different industries—people he knew did not know each other—because
he wanted to build a consensus across the board of people who were going to be
supportive of policies.
I was seated at the end of the table, and my wife was
sitting right next to him. This is when he was trying to take over the [New
York City] Board of Education. He put my wife next to an assemblyman whose vote
he wanted as he knew that she was a teacher, and he tells my wife “Your job tonight
is to get his vote.”
What is the most memorable project you’ve worked on?
Grand Central Terminal, when I was with Lehr McGovern
Bovis [ Coletti served for six years as a senior vice president for the
construction firm, from 1993-1997]. I was part of the project team that won the
job, and just watching that facility get cleaned up, modernized and become a
transportation Mecca was amazing. I remember walking on the catwalk above the
lobby, and the ceiling was so dirty. I didn’t realize it was dirt. I thought it
was dark paint.
I love what Gov. Andrew Cuomo is doing because I believe that
transportation hubs are critical—they create first impressions for tourists
when they arrive. We’re 100 percent behind it, because tourism, real estate and
finance are the three drivers of our economy.
Hudson Yards to me is the single most transformational
project that I have seen in my career. When you see what’s starting to happen,
combined with the rebuilding of the World Trade Center area—I don’t care what
the cost of the hub was— it’s worth it. Downtown is a new city. I come back to
Midtown and sayto my wife, “I’m in the old part of the city.”
Developers here continue to amaze me because they have to
have guts. They have to borrow a lot of money. One person I have a tremendous
amount of respect for is Larry Silverstein. On a Monday, Larry signed a 99-year lease
for the World Trade Center, and on Tuesday it was bombed. But he was not going
to allow anyone to stop the redevelopment. People of that ilk—the Steve Rosses,
the Gary Barnetts, the Dursts, the Rudins, the Speyers, the Silversteins—that
core of New York City is not only strongly committed financially, but they have
a vision of this city.
What is the biggest challenge that you’re facing right
now at the BTEA?
One issue is the public policy environment in which we
build. “Bureaucratic” is probably too polite a word. It’s where I spend a good
part of my time. We work very closely with the city and state administrations in
terms of trying to advance legislation and regulations that make the building
environment more productive and more efficient. But it’s getting harder and
harder to do.
The other issue is the city and state’s minority- and
women-owned business goals. There’s a requirement that [contractors] hire MWBs
for 40 percent of the work in the city and 30 percent in the state. We don’t
believe that capacity exists. If my prime contractors don’t attain those goals,
they get penalized with a negative evaluation, which then impacts their ability
to bid another job. That was not the way the program was designed, so we’re
doing some studies and feel that we’ve been supportive of growing MWB
companies. But you can’t do this in a punitive way, and that’s what has happened.
What is one of the proudest moments in your career?
One of the things I am most proud of is a nonprofit that
Ed Malloy, past president of the Building and Construction Trades Council,
established—Construction Skills, where a New York high school graduate goes to
the top of the list of the apprentice programs, and the current building trades
president has expanded these efforts. These programs have lists of [5,000] to
10,000 people, and they are monitored very closely. Of the 8,000 apprentices,
65 percent are African-American, Latino or women, and 75 percent are New York
City residents. You look at these factoids, and 10 to 15 years ago there was 10
percent minority workers and most of the trades living in Long Island or
Connecticut or New Jersey.
What other experiences stand out when you think about
your career?
On 9/11, I actually was looking out my window on 28th
Street and saw the second plane hit. So I get on the phone and try to call the
city to see what I could do. Obviously you couldn’t get through, so I tell my
public relations consultant to put me on television. I basically say, anyone
who wants to help, here’s my number—call the office. I was getting calls from
all over the country and one was from Ken Holden. He was the Department of Design
and Construction Commissioner at the time. He said, “Lou. We need masks, we
need this and we need that.” I got on the phone with my members, and we
delivered them. And that call to arms continued when [Superstorm] Sandy hit.
Thank God for the city of New York that this industry was as unionized as it
was. Think about how the city would try to organize the hundreds of contractors
and thousands of skilled workers they needed immediately at that site. The city
made two phone calls—one to labor, one to BTEA , and you had an army of workers
and contractors that could respond immediately to help.
What’s next for the BTEA?
Our focus is on contractors. Because of the past strong
relationship we had with labor, [people] still confuse me as representing
labor, and I have to say, “No. We represent businesses.” I feel a
responsibility to the BTEA members who have been so supportive to me throughout
my 30 years, and I take my role very seriously as a responsibility and
obligation to try to assist them with this direction. Will I be successful? I
don’t know. But I’m going to try.
Source: Commercial
Observer
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