Lonnie was recently elected President of the GCA.
Leon “Lonnie” Jacobs, P.E., CSP is a giant among construction engineers. With over 40 years of experience in civil and underground construction in the New York metropolitan area, Lonnie has worked on many of the region’s most important infrastructure projects, including the New York City Department of Environmental Protection’s Water Tunnel and Shafts, MTA Bridge & Tunnel’s Queens Midtown Tunnel Rehabilitation Project, and the Rehabilitation of the 33-mile NYCDEP New Croton Aqueduct. After three decades with Frontier-Kemper, last year Lonnie brought his expertise to Halmar International, where he currently serves as an executive vice president. In 2024, Lonnie was given the prestigious title of fellow by the American Society of Civil Engineers, and last month was elected President of the General Contractors Association of New York.
BTEA President Elizabeth Crowley spoke with Lonnie about his priorities as GCA President and what the future-looking infrastructure projects are that he thinks would positively transform New York City.
BTEA: Tell us about the work Halmar Industries does, and what you believe are the biggest opportunities and challenges in the current landscape of New York infrastructure development?
Halmar is primarily focused on heavy highway and transit infrastructure projects. The current condition of our local infrastructure system provides us with tremendous repair, upgrading, rebuilding, and replacement opportunities. In addition, there remains a substantial amount of resiliency work that needs to be accelerated. Funding all this work has always been the challenge. We can’t continue to simply repair or replace our existing infrastructure. We need to develop long range projects that expand capacity, ease traffic and commuting times, and upgrade our antiquated water, sewer and electrical infrastructure systems. Many of these systems’ components date back to the early 1900s and are in serious need of replacement.
BTEA: You are a longtime member of the General Contractors Association and served in several leadership roles within the organization before becoming its President. From your perspective, what is the importance of the GCA and what are your primary goals for the association during your tenure as President?
As the GCA logo states, “We Build New York.” Our membership does this in partnership with our local union labor and our collaboration with federal, state and city agencies, authorities, and commissions. The GCA is 115 years old, and it’s had a tremendous history. My goal for the GCA is to help set the stage for the association’s growth and expansion, not only for the next two years, but for the next 115.
There’s a lot of key elements that the GCA focuses on, like advocating for the funding that we need to do the projects that our membership builds, and getting the approvals we need from the MTA, the Port Authority, New York City and State’s infrastructure agencies, as well as from Amtrak and Washington, D.C. Some specific examples are helping the MTA close its $33 billion gap in funding for its 2025-2029 capital plan; supporting the wide range of Port Authority investments in its airports, bridges, and tunnels; advocating for a new West Side Bus Terminal; and, hopefully, resurrecting the LaGuardia AirTrain. Also, we need to make sure that the promises the federal government and New York State have made to the Gateway Development Commission and that Amtrak has made to fund the Hudson River tunnels and Penn Station redevelopment and expansion actually come to fruition. That’s why we continue to press New York City and State leaders to provide the needed funding in their budgets to repair and expand our visible roads, bridges, and transit systems, as well as our invisible infrastructure. There’s a tremendous amount of infrastructure that the public doesn’t see, but without it city life could not be sustained.
In addition, we push to relieve our members from costly and unnecessary regulatory and legislative overreach at every level of government. For instance, we have made strides in advocating the streamlining of the federal NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act] process to speed up project delivery, but more needs to be done. Right now, it takes more than a year in pre-NEPA approvals and outreach before you can even begin the formal EIS process, which itself is supposed to take no more than two years. We also want to re-examine overbearing OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] policies. I think OSHA serves a tremendous purpose, particularly when it comes to non-union contractors. I believe union contractors are self-policing, yet their safety record doesn’t get properly acknowledged. It unfairly gets rolled up into overall industry safety statistics. From a union contractor point of view, we fully recognize the importance of making sure that all our employees work safely and go home in the condition in which they came to work. Then there’s a collaboration on insurance reform and focusing on the elimination of the antiquated and expensive Scaffold Law, which, we all know, drives up project costs tremendously in New York and limits the competition for insurance brokerage. Instead of funding extraordinary project insurance costs, we could be investing those dollars in brick-and-mortar projects, and in turn expand the amount of work we can do improving our infrastructure and increase the number of people we employ.
BTEA: As an organization, we recently looked at OSHA’s statistics from across the country and found that New York’s safety numbers are comparable to those in other states. In fact, we’re pretty much in line with California, and yet our insurance costs are about four times higher than theirs. Given your vast experience in the industry, can you speak to whether the Scaffold Law makes New York any safer than the 49 states in the nation that don’t have an absolute liability standard for contractors in the case of gravity-related construction accidents?
I don’t think the Scaffold Law has anything to do with ensuring the safe working environment we provide for our employees. I think it strictly impacts the cost of doing business in New York, the cost of the premium you pay for insurance, and the cost of claims strictly due to the imposition of absolute liability on the property owner—and thus the Contractor—which are nowhere near in line with the rest of the country.
BTEA: In addition to being President of the GCA, you also serve on the Board of Governors of the BTEA. How do you think the BTEA and GCA can best work together for the greater good of the industry?
We can collaborate on our outreach to various city agencies. There are several Department of Buildings (DOB) requirements that are antiquated, or need to be revised and updated, or are just overbearing. There are relationships that need to be improved between various city agencies so that they can work better together and more collaboratively. Getting decisions made faster from some of the agencies would help tremendously. There also needs to be a leveling of the risk. You can’t keep shifting the risk to the contractor and expect the contractor to give you a low price. If you want the contractor to give you a low price, then you must be fair in terms of your contract language and your leveling of the risk. It’s the old story, it hasn’t changed: the one who can best manage the risk is the one who should own the risk. And unfortunately, that’s not always the situation.
BTEA: You have played a key role in building many of the most far-sighted, important infrastructure projects in recent New York history. What are some of the great, ambitious infrastructure projects you would like to see our state undertake that it does not already have underway?
The Flushing Bay CSO [Combined Sewage Overflow] has been talked about for years. The tunnel from Staten Island to Brooklyn. Right now, we put rail cars on barges and float them across the harbor to move freight from Jersey City, New Jersey to Brooklyn, New York. The IBX [Interborough Express] is an example of a thoughtful project that’ll be of great benefit to the public and reduce commutes. The LaGuardia AirTrain which was cancelled just as it was ready to go to construction. The entire region definitely needs better public transportation to get to and from LaGuardia airport rather than continuing to be reliant on inconvenient and cumbersome bus transfers. The Second Avenue Subway is a great opportunity where we’re expanding the subway into a neighborhood that has been underserved by transit for decades. That said, there are many other communities that need to be served, too. Then there are the roads or bridges that are just so congested and need to be not just rebuilt but expanded to handle the increased traffic we have. We’re simply not doing as much as we could or should be doing in this regard. We want to help the City and State to address these needs. That’s what Halmar, and the GCA, are all about.