Tribune/Debra Reid - A Red Baron replica is "flown" into position by crane at the Legends at Sparks Marina on Tuesday. YESCO (Young Electric Sign Company) out of Sparks and other local companies are preparing for Thursday's grand opening.
“For most of them, it was a finite job,” said Dave Claflin, vice president of marketing for RED Development, the muscle behind the Legends build-out. “Once those jobs are finished, their work will be done.”
Pre-construction studies by Meridian Business Advisors and the University of Nevada, Reno Center for Regional Studies predicted that Legends would generate 7,600 jobs throughout its six-year construction period with an economic output of $789 million.
Q&D Construction representatives said that they had about 250 workers on the site, but added that many more could be running around as subcontractors.
To date, Q&D, the lead contractor on the project, has been unable to pinpoint a total number of workers on the project.
“The (individual) stores sometimes hire their own contractors to do some work,” said Sheila Hlubucek, communications director for Q&D. “There is a whole boat load of work out there.”
Local union groups couldn’t put a figure on the number of workers on site at Legends, either, citing complaints that they hadn’t received prevailing wage reports from some smaller subcontractors for a matter of months.
“These guys are slipping in there, doing their work and the city isn’t getting the list of contractors,” said Paul McKenzie, head of building trades for the local union Building and Construction Trades Council.
"I'm sure that we would have some sense of which contractors or subs are over there," said city of Sparks spokesman Adam Mayberry. "We have to monitor the project for prevailing wage (requirements)."
Somewhere in that crowd of workers on the Legends site Tuesday was Scott Nelson, who was doing concrete work near the dueling cowboy statues for Diversified Concrete Cutting.
“I just hope the next phase starts up soon,” Nelson said, craning his neck to look over a wall into the open field that stretches along the north side of Legends. Otherwise, he said, he will once again be looking for work in a slow construction economy.
Due to what Claflin termed “retailers pushing back their dates and RED pushing forward,” about 16 stores will not be opening until later this summer. According to Claflin, the stores’ delayed opening dates are because of economic forces rather than local permitting or construction issues.
A few stores are significantly lagging behind, including T-Rex, A Prehistoric Adventure restaurant and dinosaur experience.
According to Claflin, T-Rex has an existing lease with RED Development, but they are also subject to current rough economic forces.
Economic forces may be to blame as well for the troubled Legends Bay Casino project and the planned arena project.
Both projects are hoped to bring in tourists, with the arena bringing stadium-style entertainment to Sparks while the $450 million resort hotel and casino would bring gaming revenue. But with lenders tightening their cash flows, the arena and casino may be farther away than Claflin originally thought.
The first phase of the resort casino was originally slated to open in August 2008.
He said that “plan B” for the vacant lot behind Scheels would be retail build-out if the arena didn’t find its necessary funding.
Officials from the casino project, being built by Olympia Gaming, said that nothing much has changed for the casino other than the freezing credit markets.
“We designed a project that we think is a good fit for there, but right now the credit markets are locked up with the gaming industry,” D.C. Graham, chief marketing development officer for Olympia Gaming, told the Tribune. “We’re waiting for the credit markets to free up for lending purposes.”
According to Q&D, the average weekly on-site work crew was around 250 people – about half of its 500 total construction workforce.
Hlubucek said that about 60 percent of the workers on the ground were permanent Q&D employees while the remaining 40 percent were found through unions.
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