Construction firms met with Columbia administrators and local government representatives on Tuesday, in an event that gave firms the chance to pursue the possibility of working in Manhattanville this summer.
At the meeting, which was attended by local and non-local firms, Manhattanville construction vice president Philip Pitruzzello discussed pending construction projects for the Manhattanville campus expansion.
Michael A. Dickerson, president of the local corporation Tightseal Construction, said that many of the firms in attendance were pleased with the opportunities available.
“I’ll definitely follow up … I live in Harlem so that’s the community situation,” Dickerson said. “I like to put people from around the neighborhood back to work.”
John Stathis of Harlem’s Absolute Plumbing and Heating agreed that the presentation was helpful. He added that his firm has had a good relationship with Columbia for nearly three decades.
“Manhattanville is primarily union … but it’s possible we might be able to do some of their non-union stuff,” he said.
La-Verna Fountain, Columbia’s associate vice president for construction business services and communications, said that the difficulty of hiring non-union firms has limited the University’s capacity to hire locally.
Still, she added, Columbia has worked hard to hire minority-, women-, and locally owned firms. Senior Executive Vice President Robert Kasdin said in an interview last week that Columbia has been “exceeding every metric that has been identified … in respect to construction firms and workforce participation by minorities, women, and locals.”
But some, including Community Board 9 chair Georgiette Morgan-Thomas, are concerned that Columbia is not doing as much for MWL firms as it claims. At a recent CB9 meeting, she said that one of Columbia’s primary contractors, McKissack & McKissack, has not sufficiently reached out to Harlemites.
“McKissack has brought in women and minorities, it’s just that they are not from our community,” Morgan-Thomas said. “What we’re hoping to do is to begin to bring McKissack up to snuff, so that they may have the resources to tap into individuals who live in our district. We don’t just want women and minorities hired—we want local women and minorities and businesses to benefit from this Manhattanville project.”
Dickerson, Stathis, and many of the business representatives who attended the meeting in Lerner Hall’s Satow Lounge work for construction, maintenance, or painting firms. But there were also attendees from technology-based companies that want to boost the Manhattanville campus’s technological capacities.
David Grey said he is confident that there is opportunity for his company, Skyline Connections, to take part in the Manhattanville expansion. Skyline Connections works primarily in security and access control, and Grey said his company has proposed to equip Manhattanville campus buildings with high-tech entry scanners. These devices would scan vascular patterns in the backs of people’s hands and match those scans to pictures before granting entry into buildings.
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