Published September 2002

Building a casino,
building a future
Joint venture between Tulalip business and national contractor supports American Indian jobs

By John Wolcott
SCBJ Editor

Tulalip tribal businesses and laborers are helping to build their own future as they build a $72 million casino in Quil Ceda Village west of Marysville.

An innovative joint venture between Mortenson, a national general contracting firm, and Gobin Hauling and Excavating, a local Tulalip tribal business, is giving American Indian-owned businesses a rare opportunity to show what they can do on a complex major project.

Out of the 56 businesses involved in the first phase of the construction, 36 of the subcontractors are American Indian-owned companies. Their contracts total nearly $14 million of the $31 million worth of work awarded so far to the Mortenson/Gobin Joint Venture partnership.

Of the 201 craft workers on the site July 1, there were 91 Tulalip tribal members, members of tribal families or other American Indians. With no hint of tokenism on this project, American Indians worked 51,657 of the 108,921 total hours that craft workers had put into the project by July 1.

Overall, Mortenson’s hired construction crew for the casino project is 70 percent American Indian, said Jim Redfield, Mortenson’s project manager.

“This came about because of the way the Tulalips bid the project, selecting not just the best-qualified general contractor but the one who would agree to heavily involve Native Americans in the work force,” Redfield said. “But, along with Mortenson and Gobin, it’s the subcontractors who have made it a success. Our subs not only reached out to Tulalip tribal businesses but also to Indian country, filling jobs with Indian brick layers from North Dakota and Alaska and bringing Puyallups and Mohawks here for the construction work.”

To make the unusual contract work, Mortenson had to put aside thoughts of some of the stereotypes about American Indian workers and also work through union contract concerns.

“The tribes have the workers. They’re good. They show up for work and give an honest day’s work. We’re on schedule and under budget. The old stereotypes we heard about Indian workers — that we would get something less than we needed — were wrong. Those stereotypes are coming down. They should have come down a long time ago,” he said.

Tulalip Tribes member Glen Gobin said the Mortenson/Gobin leadership told contractors in the pre-bidding meetings, “If you’re not willing to think outside of the box and meet the TERO (Tribal Employment Rights Office) requirements, forget about it. … We want those who want to really participate.”

Gobin, with nearly 20 years in construction and trucking, said, “Native American-owned companies and workers are there, but it’s hard to get work on major projects, so our joint venture created this opportunity for them.”

Redfield said one of the major factors that made the process work was that the Tulalips are financing the casino construction themselves, so there are no federal funds ... that might govern how minority companies and workers are selected. However, he said, since Mortenson is a union-worker company, and Gobin’s is not, the joint-venture partnership had to come to grips with those hiring challenges.

“It hasn’t all been rosy,” Gobin said. “We had a lot of issues to work out. We reached agreements with most of the local craft unions that Native Americans on this project had the option to join or not join the union. Normally, they’d have to join or be excluded.

“We established a wage scale for all the crafts that mirrored the prevailing wages in Snohomish County for those crafts, so we didn’t have an hourly wage rate that was all over the place. And we gave the unions an opportunity to organize workers at non-union Native American businesses on the project. Insurance issues and bonding requirements and capabilities were other issues we settled, but the union one was the major issue.”

The largest firms on the project are union, he said, but the Mortenson/Gobin negotiations provided a compromise that provided a major segment of American Indian employment, and the unions gained many new members, Redfield said.

“TERO employment requirements have always been a part of our tribal contracts,” Gobin said, “but we’ve taken it a step further with this project. For the first time here we’ve made Native American participation part of the selection determination in the bid process.”

Among the unusual concessions in the casino contract that has helped the process work well has been the establishment of a trade apprentice school, part of the Tulalips’ proactive approach to developing a larger work force of qualified American Indian laborers.

“We want to get jobs (for American Indians) beyond this project,” Gobin said. “With all of the (Tulalip) tribes’ growth here, we’ve provided more job opportunities across the board, in construction, in new businesses starting to happen on the reservation, building a health clinic and different housing projects.”

Gobin noted that American Indian gaming revenues that are financing the new casino project are “staying in the community and getting recycled over and over in the local economy.”

Redfield said he was pleasantly surprised at how well the cooperative arrangements have played out, helped in part by learning about American Indian culture and laws from Gobin and from teaching sessions provided by the Tulalips.

“We’ve enjoyed this partnership, and we’re very pleased to see the results. If you’d asked us before about numbers like these we wouldn’t have expected it (to happen like this). We’re the facilitator. The subs made it work, Glen and the tribal members made it work.”

Mortenson, he said, wants to be known as having a comprehensive and successful American Indian employment program in Indian country, including providing a learning atmosphere in a work environment.

“This whole joint venture between Mortenson and Gobin’s company started out as a business relationship but — with Glen and I — it’s ended up a friendship, too,” Redfield said.

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