Construction industry's success is its big problem

At the end of a hectic workday, Gordon Gibbons takes a brief break in my office to talk about construction in Montecito. He sits down at one end of the old leather couch, leans back and lets out a sigh. Within moments the phone in his breast pocket rings and his right hand fumbles for it.

“HelloGordonspeaking,” he says and it all comes out in one well-oiled word. “I’m in a meeting. Can I call you back?”

Like most general contractors these days, Gibbons is busy. He visits three to seven job sites a day, his dog — a German shepard-husky mix — in the back of his SUV and his cell phone constantly interrupting. At 53, Gibbons has a closely cropped white beard and the air of a man who knows it could all be done differently. In fact, it actually used to be done differently, back when he began working in tile, concrete and masonry, in 1971.

Times have changed. He likes to say that Montecito is now undergoing a rate of construction and remodeling work “greater than at any other time in the history of the planet.”

Hyperbole, yes, but a look at the line of construction workers headed off the freeway in their gleaming Ford F-150 trucks onto San Ysidro Road on any given weekday morning supports the description. The problem is, more than ever, Montecitans have the money, time and agida for constant tinkering: a new bathroom, extra wing, kitchen remodel, or even total teardown.

The construction field’s success is its biggest problem.

Gibbons is forever yanking out perfectly good fixtures — toilets, blinds, sinks, and generally bits of houses — that he doesn’t know what to do with. He tries to find other homes for them, even tried to send building materials south after Hurricane Katrina, but often can’t.

“I used to hang on to the stuff hoping that someone could reuse it, but the pile became too big and nobody wanted it,” Gibbons says. Nevertheless, he succeeds in recycling a good portion of it through workers and their families and friends.

The construction boom is evident in how many new design shops have sprouted up around Santa Barbara.

“Twenty years ago there was a plumbing store in this town. There was maybe a kitchen store. Now . . . you could probably find more than 10 kitchen design stores in this town. Where are the people coming from who are trained to install this coming from? The town didn’t grow that big,” he says.

Gibbons pauses to clutch his chest.

“What . . . is that my heart or is it my friggin’ phone?” he says, laughing.

Once he dispatches the call, Gibbons tells me that when he was young and just out of school “everyone I dealt with was extremely experienced in their trade. And they were also very knowledgeable about the other trades so that when they were performing their work they were anticipating the needs of the other tradesmen.”

Now, however, workers are like lawyers who haven’t been to law school, have never tried a case and are brought in to take over halfway through a trial. Gibbons holds onto subcontractors who do good work, and he’s got relationships that have lasted years, but if his clients insist on going with the lowest bidders, the work often suffers in a way it didn’t used to.

Gibbons is stunned that most new workers can’t read plans correctly. He took drafting and drawing classes every year from seventh through 12th grade in high school. Before he even got to his first job, reading plans “was like reading comics to me,” he says. “You just read.”

Now, however, Gibbons has to verbally and visually show workers how to do each task and check up on them repeatedly throughout the day. Exacerbating this problem is that architecture is becoming more complicated and harder to execute for these inexperienced workers than it used to be.

“Everybody is designing everything on the fringe and nouveau, and it takes quite a bit more added effort to think out how these things are supposed to assemble and go together . . . The architecture we’re coming up with is great, but when you send a neophyte in there to assemble it,” the potential for shoddy work and costly mistakes increases.

So what’s the solution?

“The solution is in the worker and it’s not going to happen because they don’t go out of their way to educate (themselves). They don’t have a passion for their work . . . They’re here because they heard there was a dollar to be made here.”