One 2 One: Congressman Richard Hanna (R-NY)
AN OCCASIONAL SERIES: ONE 2 ONE WITH SOME OF THE
Congressman Richard Hanna (R-NY)
talks to Editor-in-Chief John Latta
Richard Hanna was elected in November 2010 to represent the 24th District of
(upstate) New York. At 20, he became the primary supporter of his mother and
four sisters after his father died suddenly. For eight years, he supported the family
and paid off its substantial debt. Hanna earned an honors degree in economics
and political science. He founded Hanna Construction, which he ran for 27 years.
Today, Hanna serves on the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, where he is vice chair of the Subcommittee on Highways and Transit, and
on the Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings and Emergency
Management and the Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials. We talked in his Capitol Hill office.
Q You had a construction business before you became a
deep sewer, lots of water, lots of gas lines. We’ve done Wal-Marts,
Kmarts, Lowes, Home Depots. We did a lot of athletic fields, urethane tracks, water towers. I’ve probably built 20 water towers.
When I got out, I had an auction and sold a lot, and my sister –
who had worked for me for a number of years – and her son took
over and they’re doing quite well. I have no part in it, other than if
they need advice or something. I signed off. I help them where I can.
Congressman.
A
Q
A
We did earthworks, roads, water … all heavy construction, everything.
All things infrastructure … lots of concrete work. I taught the business to
myself. I started when I was 20. This wasn’t a family business, although
my dad was a carpenter and I’d been around construction a little bit. He
built houses. I got out of college, I was broke, I had an old backhoe and I
started doing the basic home stuff, and then, not too far out, within a year
or two, I was doing all sort of commercial work … did it for almost 30
years. I lived in a very difficult community to grow a big business, small,
but gradually I learned that the more I could do, the easier it was to stay
busy in a small place. In other words, I was really diverse.
Q Do you feel some sort of responsibility to represent
contractors in the House?
A
You built it from the ground up?
Oh, from nothing. I sort of started small and built. As I knew more, I
could do more. And as I had people who could do more, which also allowed me to branch out … you know you have guys who are good at
this or that. So I wound up on average having maybe 13 jobs going every day. And we’d have a sewer crew, and a concrete crew, all the basics. I
always had lots of bulldozers moving and that kind of stuff. But we were
small; we were never a big company, we couldn’t grow too much.
Q How big did it get to be?
A Well, I think on average we probably had 40 to 55 people working
full time, and over the years we’ve employed about 450 people
total. My business was equipment intensive, so we could do one hell
of a lot of work with 20 or 30 or 40 people.
Q So all heavy construction; you didn’t really specialize?
A No, no. There were things that I enjoyed more than others, but
we certainly did our share of road work and we’ve done lots of
32 February 2012 Better Roads
Absolutely. I know the business … but I’m still learning this end.
And I’ve had a union shop, non-union shops. I’ve got 25 years
myself as an operator; I have my union card in my wallet. I never
carried this for 25 years, now I seem to open it up every few days.
Operating Engineers Local 545 … great union. I mean, things like
the Davis-Bacon Act that are so confusing for some people, for me
it’s what I lived with for so many years.
Q You see things that drive contractors crazy. How can
you change them?
A
We can try. We just wrote a bill – I’m the primary sponsor – on
bonding. When I started, you had to have a 100-percent success
rate or you could not get a bond. You had to be absolutely reliable.
And credit-worthy. That’s how I lived with it. That was my lifeline.
The insurance companies have allowed people in the business to get
bonds that under normal situations, or under old rules, wouldn’t
be bondable. So what it has done, it’s added a level of failure to
bonding. And so these guys raise the rates for other guys. They
really shouldn’t even be in the business unless they are worthy of
a bond. Under the [old] rules, there was no chance for error. When
you let marginal people in because they can sign off their house or
something and that’s collateral – collateral isn’t the definition of a
good company.