This month, carpenters will secure the final beams on Portland International Airport (PDX), wrapping up a nine-year, $2 billion effort, the largest public infrastructure project in Oregon’s history. We set out to modernize PDX, strengthen it against a major earthquake, and cut our carbon footprint while welcoming more travelers. As the project wraps up, leaders across the country are grappling with how to ease the burdens families face every day of skyrocketing food, fuel, and housing costs; stagnant wages; and infrastructure that’s long overdue for renewal. I don’t have all the solutions, but leading PDX through this transformation has left me certain about one thing: Elected officials and business leaders across the U.S. have a responsibility to prioritize investing in our local communities. Even when it’s the more labor-intensive path.
A springboard
Right now, it’s popular for leaders to talk about bringing jobs and industry back to America. What does that actually look like, though, and how can leaders make that happen without waiting for someone else to do it? For this project, it was about making our guiding question throughout: In addition to creating a beautiful, functional airport, how can we use this as a springboard for local growth and prosperity?
Our communities needed quality jobs; timber, our region’s founding industry, needed support. But the focus didn’t need to be about bringing local jobs back. It was more about giving local workers a chance—because workers, industry, and local innovation never went anywhere. All the ingredients to create something excellent were here, from raw materials to skilled workers. All we needed was to create a runway (pun intended) for all that latent possibility to become tangible opportunity.
Within our lane, could we create quality jobs for local workers, prioritize contracts for smaller regional businesses, reinvigorate industry, and keep Pacific Northwest character and values at the center? Ambitious, I know. But here I am nine years later to tell you not only did we do it, but we did it on time, on budget, and to worldwide acclaim.
Local workers, local materials
Our architect, ZGF, conceived an airport that felt like a walk through one of Oregon’s iconic forests. The signature feature would be a 9-acre lattice ceiling made from locally sourced mass timber. Securing the wood for the ceiling seemed daunting at first; we needed 3.7 million feet of boards, a hell of a lot of wood. But we worked with local small landowners and [Native American] tribes who guided us on how to source all of it from within 300 miles of the airport. Sure, it would have been easier and cheaper to find the least expensive wood and have it shipped in from wherever. But that wouldn’t have supported our vision of making each component of PDX’s renovation a springboard for local growth and prosperity.
So we didn’t source just any wood. We established rigorous standards that supported good environmental stewardship and mass timber engineering techniques. Mass timber [engineered wood panels, columns, and beams that stand in for concrete and/or steel] shows incredible promise as a way to build homes and other buildings at lower environmental and financial cost—an issue of urgent importance in the Pacific Northwest and communities across the U.S. We were able to infuse money and jobs into the local timber industry and its rural communities, while also encouraging a more sustainable, modernized method. This is a critical lifeline for communities that have faced considerably slowing revenue, job losses, and economic depression since the ’90s.
We also contracted with dozens of local mills and fabricators, working closely with businesses throughout the supply and construction chains. This is where the magic happened: taking the time to stick with these small and often family-owned businesses. Helping them navigate the skilling- and scaling-up will pay dividends for jobs and growth in these communities, potentially for generations.
With Zena Forest Products, we sourced wood for our main terminal’s floors from Oregon’s last remaining commercial oak forest. They’d never worked with the thinner trees used in mass timber construction. No time like the present to start. Our contract included funding to purchase machinery to produce the product they innovated for this project, wood parquet flooring tiles that use smaller logs. We gave them time to master the process and voilà: locally sourced, locally produced, local craftsman-installed oak floors for us—and for them, an upgraded manufacturing operation that will continue to bring jobs to a small Oregon community. Today, Zena Forest Products is still using the machines and techniques acquired on our project to manufacture and install mass timber flooring products for other clients.
Our wood sealant company, Timber Pro Coatings, was one of the only places in the region that made a product that met our environmental standards, but we needed 8,000 gallons for the whole project—a volume the mom-and-daughter shop had never produced. So, we provided technical assistance to help them grow their operations to accommodate projects of this size. They were considering closing, but they’ve earned so much business as a result of their work with PDX that the daughter has taken the reins, updated their facility, and expanded production.
Shared prosperity
Undoubtedly, each of these relationships was more labor intensive for our team than if we had contracted with the big global company or abandoned our commitment to our region’s environmental health. We created and staffed an entire 22-person internal team, including a senior executive, to work with our local vendors, helping coach them and solve problems together so they could meet the opportunity of this moment. But isn’t it our responsibility as leaders to build shared prosperity for our region? We can’t wait for someone else to take a chance on our local businesses. We have to build room for that in our processes and our budgets. That’s how we generate growth and jobs for today and set up future generations for success.
At the end of this project, we’ve worked with around 140 small businesses that were awarded more than $274 million in work, and created jobs for 30,000 workers. Our completed terminal adds 24 new shops and restaurants—all 100% local or regional brands. We’re also doing this in an authentic way that maintains our region’s “keep Portland weird” character, like therapy llamas and bringing back the cult-beloved PDX carpet for shoe selfies.
This is not a Pollyanna story about how easy it is to solve complex public infrastructure problems or rebalance local economies. Yet our experience is an example of how leaders can—and must—take steps toward resolving that complexity. We have a responsibility to our communities to invest in them, even when it’s not the cheapest or simplest option. Impactful and sustainable local growth for our nation begins with the resources every leader has in their own backyard: local expertise and local values.