By Mar-Vic Cagurangan
Guam can execute between $4 billion and $5 billion worth of projects a year to support the military operations on island, according to a NavFac official.
The Navy currently has 68 active projects worth $4.8 billion, with 21 more contracts to be awarded in fiscal 2025, said Capt. Troy Brown, commander of NavFac Marianas.
“So there is just a tremendous amount of work out there for the construction industry. When I said that to people about a year and a half ago, they were like, ‘how much work can Guam take?’”Brown said at the opening day of the Guam Industry Forum 2024 at Dusit Thani Resort.
“Without doing anything really dramatic, we believe the industry can support us in somewhere around four to five billion dollars a year actual work execution,” he added.
The military has been building new infrastructure and facilities on Guam to accommodate the 5,000 Marines plus their dependents, who will be from Okinawa.
“We've got $4.8 billion under construction and there re several more in the plan of work for FY25. I'm telling you, you guys have the capacity to do that in a year,” Brown told the contractors at the forum.
In addition to the Marines-related projects, the defense department plans to build a Guam missile defense system with multiple components at 16 sites around the island.
“You've got to be about the maximum limit of the law,” Brown said, adding that NavFac has engaged Congress as well senior military leaders, including Joint Region Marianas and Joint Task Force Micronesia to assess the “true capacity” of the federal law for construction.
“Over the last little over a year, we've had a really focused effort on analyzing our construction capacity,” Brown said.
In determining Guam’s construction capacity, Brown said the military assessed the island’s infrastructure, including the roads, utilities and the port.
The NavFac official, however, acknowledged the construction industry’s perennial challenge with manpower shortage.
“The H2B Visa labor—I know I hear that from the industry all the time. What are you going to do?” Brown said.
He said NavFac has met with the undersecretary of defense twice this week to explore solutions and “get the right labor here to help us execute this work.”
Noting that Guam is not a stranger to a construction boom, Brown said NavFac’s presence on island goes way back to the time before and after the war.
“When I read the history books, I go back to the pre-World War II time, and I would say we built this partnership starting, I would say, 85 years ago,” he said.
“In 1939, when we started building a big program out in the deep Pacific together with our industry partners. And then the thing came along in World War II, and we worked with some of that. But throughout the period, we built this.”
Capt. Blake Burkett, officer-in-charge at Marine Corps Marianas, acknowledged unforeseen impediments that tend to slow down the pace of a project’s completion.
He advised contractors to identity the challenges “that are preventing you from going fast so that we can step in and break down barriers and that we can accelerate construction execution.”
“Our specifications is to request every contractor to find what's wrong so they have time to fix it early on before it impacts the schedule and have an opportunity to fix it,” he said.
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