The region's industrial engine is revving so much for a southern interior service company that they are now also a Prince George company.
Hoban Equipment Ltd., a heavy construction and road-building firm based in Vernon, decided to set up a second home in Prince George, moving into the Danson Industrial Site neighbourhood just before Christmas.
Company vice-president of operations Will Hoban said he was in Prince George so often he had a personal address in the city, so adding a business address was only logical.
"I've resided in Prince George since 2004," he said. "I realized I was always in P.G. anyway, so it was a natural move. The corporate reasoning for us was better access to skilled trades and construction personnel. Most of our projects were in the north anyways. P.G. was a good, central location for the northeast as well as the northwest and the west coast. When you do projects in all those regions, this is the city that fits best."
They purchased a shop and office complex on Milwaukee Way. It has a three-acre campus with just less than 20,000 square feet of repair space for their equipment maintenance program. The corporate space will be home to a team of projects managers, surveyors, quality control personnel and so on. Some will be there on a permanent basis and many will use it as a home base for project work across the northern region.
Hoban is one of the few companies in the heavy construction field that keeps most of its machinery and labour force in-house. Most use subcontractors to bulk up their project teams, but Hoban uses mostly staff.
The corporate head office will continue to be in Vernon, since they are active across Western Canada.
"We have long-term contracts in place with some major companies in the north, and we try to focus on the larger projects - one to two years of construction," said Hoban.
Some of the recent highlights include the new road construction done on Highway 97 between Sintich Road and Old Cariboo Highway and a 4-kilometre passing lane in the Fort Nelson area.
Hoban estimated that in Prince George alone, last year, the company handled 200,000 cubic metres of gravel and laid down 50,000 tonnes of asphalt.
The Highway 97 project won second place in the Grading Contractor's category in the provincial government's annual Ministry of Transportation awards.
They won the trophy in the Safety and Innovation category, and won a design-engineering award in Saskatchewan as well.
The safety and innovation project that brought them such acclaim is something Hoban is particularly proud of. The company has a patent pending for a software system that works with paving equipment. It modernized the control systems for their crusher, and also sends alerts if a human gets too close to the machine's most dangerous pieces.
The new location in Prince George is itself an innovation. The geographically central spot, and the network of roads and railways "will help reduce equipment downtime and increase the speed in which we can mobilize to our projects" when their fleet of scrapers and dump-trucks and other heavy machinery needs to be repaired or overhauled.
"The new office will bring our team together allowing a more collaborative approach to the project management process," Hoban said.
