On to the Next Big Thing

Kansas City has its new front door to the world with the recent opening of a $1.5 billion single-terminal airport, the biggest public-works project in the city’s history.

But the regional construction sector’s health extended well beyond the final phases of that transformative project. Among the 25 biggest general contractors in the region, 20 showed year-over-year revenue growth in 2022. That’s up from the 16-9 scorecard for winners in the Top 25 the previous year.

Those companies combined for more than $8.8 billion in regional construction projects last year, up from $7.81 billion in 2021. And no, it wasn’t just because of inflation, though there was certainly a healthy element of that at work.

Now, attention turns to projects like the $301 million jail being built by Jackson County, the continuing expansion of the massive Golden Plains data center in the Northland, the $2.5 billion KCI29 Logistics Park, follow-up work on the streetcar expansion from Downtown to the Country Club Plaza, and a number of nine-figure multifamily and mixed-use developments currently going up.

Thanks to the monster hiring spree undertaken at Burns & McDonnell as the firm continued to expand its construction services line while bolstering its design staff, the 30 largest contractors pushed regional employment in the construction/design-build space from 7,244 in 2021 to nearly 9,700 last year. 

That, however, is just a thin slice of the overall labor picture for the region, and doesn’t include hundreds of subcontractors and small builders. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the broader construction industry in this region employed 41,450 people in 2022, at an average wage of nearly $29 an hour.

For one measure of the Kansas City region’s construction-sector vibrancy—even through the pandemic—look no further than Newkirk Novak Construction Partners. Founded in 2017, it went from zero to nine-figure revenues within five years, and surged to $178.9 million in 2022 revenues, and a staff of nearly 50.

What makes the company’s success noteworthy is that it didn’t stumble into new types of construction work: plenty of other companies were providing the same kinds of services in general contracting, construction management, pre-construction and design-build work.