BOULDER >> Construction executives attending a BizWest CEO Roundtable last week say the effects of Trump administration tariffs haven’t had a huge effect on the local industry, at least so far. Their more-pressing concern is how to get projects past a sea of government red tape and economic hurdles.

Or as Bill Rigler, whose Greenlight Strategy LLC is in the business of keeping developments moving, put it during Tuesday’s panel discussion, it’s an issue of “helping projects get unstuck.”

Rigler cited the “20-year journey” a plan for a 2.5-million-square-foot business park focused on biotechnology and health-care-centric businesses took between its original concept and Tuesday’s groundbreaking on the vacant, roughly 300-acre Redtail Ridge property that had previously been home to the campus of Storage Technology Corp.

“There is this perspective that builders and developers have an unlimited pot of money,” he said.

“In Erie, over the last several months, between energy-code updates, a water sprinkler mandate and tap fee increases, the price of a new home has gone up $75,000. There is a perspective that developers can tap into all their assets to magically cover all of those costs. I see a big disconnect with policy-makers and elected officials about the impact of their decisions on costs that get passed on to homebuyers.

“We see this in Louisville, which had its own energy-code update, and Boulder City Council just updated their wildland interface guidelines,” Rigler said. “So being able to educate those policy-makers about how those impact the ability to get housing and commercial development built is important.”

Paul Arnold and Shannon Rogers of PG Arnold Construction LLC agreed.

“Our biggest challenge is getting projects unstuck,” said Arnold, the company’s president. “We’ve had tremendous success on the sales side over the last couple of years, and we have an enormous backlog just sitting and waiting for something to happen, whether it’s waiting for a permit to happen or waiting for bank financing to happen.”

Added Rogers, the firm’s executive vice president, “It’s taking an exceptional amount of time to get through the preplanning, the pre-construction phase, to get a project ultimately under construction.”

The on-again, off-again tariffs — what principal David Biek at Arcadea Architecture termed “volatility” and Scott Rodwin, owner of Rodwin Architecture and co-owner of Skycastle Construction, called “chaos” — might be playing a role, they said, but more in terms of uncertainty than price increases for materials.

“It could be the federal turmoil,” Arnold said. “People are just not confident, so there are a whole lot of reasons to not start work.”

That uncertainty “is really bad,” Rodwin said. “People want to know their costs, and if they can’t make that forecast, they can’t plan.”

“My big concern is all the cumulative impact of all the headwinds: high interest rates, high construction costs, high land costs,” he said. “When you put all these things together, it creates a lot of hesitancy.”

Higher expenses in the Boulder Valley remain an obstacle as well, Biek said, adding that “construction costs half as much in Windsor as here.”

Aaron Spear, Boulder market president of Bank of Colorado, one of the Roundtable’s sponsors, described tariffs as a “hidden tax that keeps inflation higher.”

Chris Gray, principal at BLDG.Collective Architecture and Design, acknowledged that “we do have some people who are on the sidelines, wondering what’s going to happen, but at the same time they also have kids who are moving on and and want to get projects going because they’re doing it for their families. We’re trying to navigate that with them and give them as much knowledge as we can about what costs are going to look like.

“It feels a little like COVID in a way,” he said.

Or the Great Recession, added Lance Cayko, co-owner of F9 Productions Inc. “The demand is there, as long as we can get through the chaos.”

Rogers said he’s noted “lots of emotion around tariffs, and lots of discussion about ‘how do we mitigate those risks?’ It’s really hedging your bets around what might be coming, and no one has the crystal ball about what is going to come.

“Where we have seen a little bit of impact is on some of the things you wouldn’t expect — like door hardware, But we’re not seeing it at the scale that everyone worries about.”

Added Arnold, “We were anticipating a flood of phone calls about significant cost escalation that never came.”

Part of the muted effect, Rodwin noted, is because, “as soon as the tariffs went down, everybody who purchases materials just stockpiled. They saw what happened during the pandemic. That, I think, has offset the impact of the tariffs.”

Still, he cautioned, “if the 80% tariff with China lasts another two months, where will we get our door hardware?”

Gray said his company “had the expected lull (in new business) during the election. Then our calls for new projects increased into early January. When tariff talk started, it tapered way down again. I feel like it might be on the rise again now that the effects of tariffs have not been as great as it was thought to be, but it’s been a little bit of a roller coaster.

“I think it just takes people a few months to settle and figure out what their best moves are,” Gray said.

“A roller coaster, that’s the way I’d describe it too,” Cayko said, noting that “every single one I talked to asked about tariffs” at a recent conference he attended. “We’ve actually gotten most of our tariff questions from single-family residential” builders, “not as much the multifamily.”

Meanwhile, getting projects from concept to construction remains a more immediate concern, the construction executives agreed.

“Erie is one of the top-15 fastest growing cities in America,” Rigler said. “Erie has 5,000 units that are permitted and titled, and 10,000 that are somewhere in the approval process. I know of four projects alone — ‘missing-middle’ housing, multifamily townhomes, collectively in the $150 million range — that have been pulled because they no longer penciled in. I see that ripple through communities to the point where the incentives only exist for single-family homes to be built, which is the exact opposite of what Colorado needs.”

That missing-middle sector will be the topic of BizWest’s Boulder Valley Middle-Income Housing Summit, to be held June 3 at Fox Hill Country Club in Longmont.

Once a project does get approved, said Paul Wallick, founder of Land Pro Civil LLC, contractors are often finding it difficult to find qualified workers.

“I’ve been getting more work going,” he said. “My big challenge is staffing, getting quality people.”

Brandon David, president of Skycastle Construction, denied that the administration’s crackdown on immigration has had an effect on his ability to find workers, but said “there’s not a lot of training” for the building trades. “There’s a stigma against construction,” he said. “The kids in K-through-12 are doing nothing with their hands.”

Wallick said he’s been trying to focus on that younger generation.

“I’ve been working on new grads, just kind of mentoring them and teaching them how to do some of the easy stuff,” he said. “But that takes a lot of my time. To bring someone in and pay them a full-time salary when I might only need them, say, 20 hours a week versus 40, that’s been one of my big challenges.”

He has placed job-opening ads for skilled people on LinkedIn and other online platforms, although he admits he’s been warned that the results might not live up to his hopes.

“I presented a project for a water systems design,” he said. “I had a whole bunch of people say, ‘Oh, yeah, we can do that,’ so I showed them my project, and their bid to do the work was a tenth of what it should be, and I knew something was wrong there. So it’s a matter of vetting all these people out.”

The executives say they’ve seen some hopeful signs in their dealings with government, however.

“I’ve actually been impressed with Boulder County lately in terms of turnaround time,” Cayko said, “but Denver’s the biggest shocker. The last few projects we’ve pushed through Denver, we’ve gotten comments back quickly, which is insane. The mayor down there, I couldn’t commend more, and I hope the rest of the state follows, because the special group that he now has in the city, he’s trying to make everybody on the staff a ‘project champion.’ You can tell the positivity there, and I’m actually getting questions answered in a day, depending on what department it is, sometimes within the hour.

“What’s really great about that,” he said, “is when I have owners and developers come to me and they’re very, very nervous, I can just calm their nerves.”

Wallick said he’s also “noticed a better response in the last year or two. It used to be a real challenge to get anybody to talk to. Now, by the end of the day, I’ll get responses in Longmont.”

Rodwin said he’s encouraged with some recent actions in the state Legislature, which has loosened regulations in several areas including construction of condominiums and building accessory dwelling units, a secondary residential unit on a single-family lot that shares a building lot with a larger primary home.

“The ADUs free up more creativity,” he said. “People have said ‘we want affordable housing but just not in my backyard.’ Now it really can be in my backyard. It lets people say ‘I don’t need a 3,000-square-foot home anymore. I’ll build a 1,000-square-foot home in my backyard and rent out my bigger home.”