Building up heat

Paul Clinton

McCarthy Building Companies might just be the hottest builder in

Orange County.

In late 2002, the Newport Beach company kicked off work on Hoag

Hospital’s $50-million Women’s Pavilion.

At the same time, McCarthy began its five-year, $171.3-million

modernization of Newport-Mesa’s schools.

Those projects came a year after McCarthy completed a new

headquarters building near Upper Newport Bay.

“Newport Beach is where we chose to have our office,” McCarthy

President Carter Chappell said. “This is home, so we feel that it’s

very important to do as much in the community as we can.”

Undertaking ambitious, complex projects has become the company’s

forte. In December, McCarthy joined a trifecta of firms building a

new $500-million Los Angeles County USC Medical Center.

McCarthy, a 139-year-old privately held company, specializes in

medical buildings, school complexes and parking garages. The company

has completed seven other projects at Hoag since 1996.

The Women’s Pavilion, because of its size and complex layout,

presented one of the steepest challenges yet for the firm, Chappell

said.

“The first challenge on the project is to do what we have to do,

which is build that building and not interrupt what they do there,”

Chappell said. “We developed a pretty sophisticated plan for that

project.”

When the company was ready to pour the building’s foundation, more

than 2,000 yards of concrete needed to be trucked to the location on

Hospital Way, the only road into Hoag.

Chappell scheduled the 220 concrete trucks for April 5, a

Saturday, when fewer cars would be using the roadway. McCarthy is

using almost 70 consultants and subcontractors. Newport Beach-based

Taylor Associates is the lead architect. The pavilion should be

finished by June of 2005.

The Newport-Mesa Unified School District’s board picked McCarthy

to overhaul its 28 schools in October 2001. Work began, on a limited

basis, last year after elaborate planning.

Since school could not be closed down for the work, McCarthy

needed to find a creative way to roll it out methodically over five

years.

“It took an awful lot of planning to figure that out,” Chappell

said. “It’s impossible to do it all in three months during the summer

when there are 28 schools.”

On that project, the company is using almost 90 subcontractors and

consultants, in addition to the bevy of suppliers for tools,

equipment and materials.

“The company has always been a family-based company,” Dennis

Katovsich said. “To see that institution reap the benefits [of the

modernization] is neat to see.”