Blueprint For The Future Construction Team Had All Ingredients For A Winning Mix

Imagine the Spokane Arena as a giant cake.

The recipe is so complicated it requires hundreds of ingredients from several grocery stores. Dozens of high-priced cooks, all gourmet specialists with egos, must be recruited. The kitchen is cramped. The host is ornery and hungry.

On Sept. 16, the oven timer goes off. The Spokane Veterans Memorial Arena must be ready.

Thousands of critics will file in for a country music concert. When the curtain opens on a new era of Spokane sports and entertainment, it closes on one of the region’s largest and most intricate construction projects ever.

More than 1,000 men and women built the Arena in little more than 18 months. It was on time and on budget. Many public projects aren’t.

Hoping to avoid cost overruns and delays, Spokane’s Public Facilities District first shopped around for a head chef. Jerry Schlatter, an Oakesdale native who built the Seattle Kingdome two decades earlier, was hired.

Schlatter’s job as project manager was to oversee a construction team - a general contractor, 33 subcontractors, an architectural firm and 15 consultants, and scores of suppliers - and put them on a 25-acre site and a tight schedule.

“I am the developer,” the 58-year-old Schlatter says. “It takes a developer role to do this kind of thing, a guy who can understand architecture and planning and regulations and construction.

“I’m the quarterback and linebacker.”

Spokane’s largest architectural firm, ALSC, was hired to design its biggest project. The low-bidding builder was a Spokane firm - Garco Construction Co. - better known, perhaps unfairly, for crafting metal warehouses.

In a rarity among general contractors, Garco gambled it could pour its own concrete and erect its own steel. It won.

Firms from all over the West were brought in to support the massive effort. Would there be too many cooks in the kitchen?

“It’s just a hellacious job,” says the gatekeeper, Schlatter. “But this went as smoothly as any arena that’s going up in the country.”

Jeff Warner, ALSC Architects’ project manager for the Arena, has three years invested in the building.

The ALSC office is cramped with more than 300 design drawings - blueprints, in lay terms - and a 40-foot-high stack of three-ring binders full of construction documents.

“Construction becomes very litigious, so you have to keep accurate records,” says Warner, 38, who calls himself an information broker, a liaison between the owner and contractor.

Unlike many public projects, the arena never became a full-employment act for lawyers.

A three-member dispute resolution board was created to referee differences of opinion and interpretation of construction plans.

The Public Facilities District appointed one member; Garco another; and they both agreed on a third.

Despite thousands of construction issues, the dispute resolution board was used only twice for about a half dozen minor debates.

“We work together as a team and not as adversaries,” says Garco project manager Wes Luster. “We like to term it as partners.”

Partners yes, Schlatter says, but not teammates.

“You just have to remember that there’s an adversarial position automatically established when you have a contract and interpretations of the contract,” he says.

“You have to maintain your position; they have to maintain theirs. Then you see how it falls out,” Schlatter says. “I’m trying real hard not to end up with litigation. We could spend a ton of dough with no tangible results.

“I don’t want lawyers running this project. I’m going to run it, and that’s been my position from the get-go.”

The Spokane Public Facilities Board began eliminating or harnessing project costs back in 1989, when it hired ALSC. Warner’s job included ensuring that everything on was schedule and on budget.

ALSC was founded 48 years ago. It was the official architect of Expo ‘74 and designed the new portion of The Spokesman-Review building, Shriners Hospital and the WSU library.

One of the first things ALSC did was hire an outside design team from Ellerbe Becket’s Kansas City office to design the arena. That office specialized in sports facilities.

The arena plan was well under way, even before voters paved the way with cash.

Garco’s entry as a major arena player was a surprise.

Not because it won the $2.4 million contract on phase one - the excavation, site work and foundation. But because it had the guts to bid on the arena itself.

The company with the corporate swagger pulled an upset over one other Spokane general contractor and a half-dozen outsiders. Its $34.2 million bid was the lowest by $600,000.

“It’s the biggest job we’ve ever done, pretty scary,” says Garco’s president, Tim Welsh. “It was obviously a big step for us to bid a project of that magnitude.”

But don’t tell Welsh his firm is a one-trick contractor. Garco has built schools, prisons, trash incinerators, bingo halls and mining facilities.

In 1989, Garco sent a crew to a remote island bear preserve near Juneau, Alaska, to build Greens Creek Mine. Two years later, Welsh’s hardhats went to the Arctic Circle to build Red Dog Mine at Kivalina. The construction season there was two months long.

“This arena was a real challenge for us, but we’ve taken on some of these other challenges,” Welsh says.

Garco’s biggest arena risk was the concrete and steel, two of the most labor-intensive components of the project. If there were screw-ups, Garco would have to eat the cost of repairs. If there were delays, Garco would have to pay the owner.

One of the biggest unknowns was how thirtysomething subcontractors would fare.

Unlike Europe, America’s public projects go to the lowest bidder, including, in this case, Garco. In Europe, they take the bids, average them and award contracts to the firm closest to the average.

“There’s always the risk you have with your subcontractors,” Welsh says. “It’s like the lowest bidder building the Skylab. Is that always best?”

Six weeks before the arena is set to open, Garco employees are scurrying around the project like agitated bees.

Every construction insider knows the last 5 percent of a job is the toughest.

The seats are going in, the toilet partitions, tile, the signs. Painters and electricians are busy. The marble countertops for the concession areas are nearly two months behind schedule.

When they first arrived by truck, they were all broken and had to be reordered. They’re late, Welsh says. “It’s going to be a struggle right to the very end.”

Will he be able to relax come Sept. 16?

“Hell no,” he says. “You hear the horror stories: The sewer gets blocked on opening night. The air conditioner goes out the first day, blows a breaker. That project will be with us for a long time to come.”

Warner, the architect, approaches opening night with reservation.

“You kinda hold your breath hoping that you don’t end up in the newspaper like the STA building,” he says. “In a public building, you have a chance of people really turning on it.”

Luster, Garco’s on-site point man, leaves an interview to take a conference call and haggle with a subcontractor over those countertops.

He returns unfazed.

“The first event will go on,” he vows.

The cake will not fall.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo; Graphic: Big arenas, big bills