John Ackerman, the new chief executive of Los Angeles World Airports, the city agency that runs Los Angeles International Airport, made headlines recently when he said the agency was shelving plans to add two new multibillion-dollar terminals at LAX due to revised projections of slower passenger growth. The new terminals would be built only if and when they are needed, he said.
But there is a silver lining in this for civil construction contractors. Ackerman said that instead, LAWA intends to pour more resources into fixing up the existing – and aging – basic infrastructure at the airport.
As a first step in this direction, LAWA has released an expanded MATOC, which stands for “multiple award task order contracts.” Government agencies use MATOCs to keep a pool of construction, engineering and design firms on tap for bundles of future facilities and infrastructure work.
In the case of work at LAX, the construction and design MATOC has been expanded to $2.5 billion worth of projects from the previous level of $1 billion worth of projects.
This new MATOC has now gone out as a request for qualifications to construction, design and engineering companies. And this expanded MATOC has played a role in luring one out-of-state company to boost its aviation practice here.
Boston-based Suffolk Construction Co. Inc., which has had a presence in the Southern California market for nearly 20 years, recently brought in an aviation construction market specialist to its downtown Los Angeles office.
“We don’t have any projects yet at LAX, but we are now actively pursuing this design-build MATOC at LAX,” said Leif Johnson, west region aviation consultant for Suffolk.
Johnson noted that LAWA’s shift to upgrading its current infrastructure at LAX portends an immediate boost to design and construction companies. That’s because it would have taken several years – perhaps into the next decade – for construction to begin on those two new terminals. But projects such as upgrading the electrical infrastructure at the Tom Bradley International Terminal or the plumbing at Terminal 5 are needed now and can be ready to go as soon as they are bid out.
Qualification bids are due next month; sometime shortly after that the list of firms that qualify for this MATOC will be released. Once that list is finalized, individual infrastructure upgrade projects will be put out to bid for the qualified pool of contractors.
