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William Rocha is vice president and head of Texas at Chicago-based national infrastructure builder FH Paschen. The opinions are the author’s own.
Texas is growing at a rate few states can match. From 2020, the state has added more than 2.5 million new residents, according to the US Census Bureau, with major cities like Dallas-Fort Worth i Houston has almost 100,000 new residents in each of the last five years.
With this population increase, elected officials are driving one of the nation’s largest infrastructure expansions to meet demand with more than $200 billion in planned and ongoing improvements to transportation and utility infrastructure.
But as these project pipelines accelerate across Texas, a less visible challenge is emerging: the risk that, in the face of the need for speed, comes the temptation to overlook quality.
Across the Lone Star State, local and regional governments are asking builders to bid on increasingly complex construction projects including airport terminals and tracks, new and expanded hospitals i modern mass transport systems in accelerated terms.
Guillem Rocha
Courtesy of FH Paschen
at the same time, labor shortage and the ongoing supply chain uncertainty they collide with this reality forcing everyone to make difficult decisions that begin to strain coordination, supervision and, above all, quality control.
pressure points
The pressure points are becoming clearer.
First, the qualified labor crisis. Nationally, some estimates call for more than a hundred thousand new construction workers across all trades. But here in Texas, the shortage is even more acute. Look no further than any large workplace today and you’ll see less experienced teams, overstretched supervisors, and the increased potential for security incidents and lost details.
Second, project timelines are being compressed. Project owners, including municipal governments and Airport authorities are increasingly turning to design-build and other expedited delivery methods to keep pace with the needs created by this boom in usage arising from recent population growth.
Although effective in many cases, these approaches reduce the margin for error. When schedules are compressed, so are the opportunities for thorough inspection, coordination, and even problem solving.
Finally, the sheer scale of this infrastructure investment is testing existing systems.
This $200 billion in spending over the next decade is driven by a combination of locals, been and previously assigned federal infrastructure funding to fulfill the plans in the next decade. But delivering these projects at this kind of scale requires more than just capability. It requires consistency in execution.
Overall, the growing tension is clear. How can we build Texas faster without compromising the long-term quality of these critical projects?
Constant quality controls
How we address this challenge requires a change in the way these transportation and utility projects are planned and completed.
Quality assurance is something that builders and owners can no longer see as a “final” door to pass through before the work is completed. Rather, we are seeing positive results when it begins to be integrated throughout a project’s lifecycle, from acquisition to final completion. Landlords are already beginning to reconsider how contracts are structured to ensure speed does not come at the expense of this necessary oversight.
Building the right workforce requires new ideas like training and exposure to continuing education so we can close the experience gap in Texas workplaces.
But just as important is aligning expectations. Delivering Texas’ next generation of complex infrastructure at as fast a pace as possible requires clear prioritization and balancing of what needs to be done quickly and when time cannot be compressed without risk.
Texas has a long legacy of going “bigger” on everything. This includes the infrastructure plan. However, sustaining this growth will depend on whether the construction sector can match this scale with discipline. Because in infrastructure, the cost of “good enough” is rarely immediate, but always appears in the long term.
