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okc.biz

Heidi Rambo Centrella
5.27.2009

Devon Energy today announced it has officially selected a general contractor for the company’s planned 54-story headquarters building in Downtown Oklahoma City. For just this project, the general contractor will be named “Holder Flintco.”

Atlanta-based Holder Construction and Oklahoma-based Flintco Inc. entered into a joint venture on the project, with Holder being the majority partner in a 60-40 split.

“It’s important to have somebody that, on a national level, has done such impressive work with corporate headquarters,” said Devon spokesman Tony Thornton, citing the many Fortune 500 company headquarters Holder has seen to fruition. “And Flintco, obviously, has done extremely impressive work locally. They know Oklahoma. And they know subcontractors.

“It’s really important for us to have as many local subcontractors as is viable for the project,” he said. “Flintco knows those subcontractors much better than we do, so we really see that as a win-win for us.”

One advantage to getting Holder, Thornton said, is the company was extremely aggressive on the time schedule – more so than some of the other contenders. They saw the possibility of beginning construction on the deep foundation work of the tower to begin simultaneously with the site preparation work on the garage, he said.

“Previously, we had thought those would not necessarily begin simultaneously,” Thornton said. “The end result of that is it will displace people who are parking in the Gallaria garage for a much shorter period of time. And we’re thrilled about that, because that’s the last thing we want to do is displace people from their parking spots any longer than we have to.”

Thornton said given estimates are a maximum of 60 days that the garage will be unusable.

Oct. 1 is the projected start date, and estimated completion date is 2012 on the $750 million project – however, officials hope that price tag might be reduced a bit.

“I think once we get all the subcontractors lined up and once the general contractors get those people hired, we’ll have a better idea of where that $750 million figure fits,” Thornton said. “Our hope is still that, with the economy the way it is, we’re able to be a little bit off of that with the lowering cost of construction materials.”