‘City
of
Roses’
Minority &
Small Business
WEEK Special Edition
Volume XLVI • Number 40
www.portlandobserver.com
Wednesday • October 4, 2017
Established in 1970
Committed to Cultural Diversity
photo by D anny p eterson /t he p ortlanD o bserver
Andrew Colas of Colas Construction outside the Oregon Convention Center on Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard where his Portland-based firm won a $27 mil-
lion contract to make renovations to the 30-year-old facility, the largest contract ever awarded to a minority-owned business by Metro regional government.
Minority firm
wins biggest
ever Metro job
by D anny p eterson
t he p ortlanD o bserver
A $27 million construction project, the
largest ever doled out to a minority-owned
business from the regional government
Metro has been awarded to Colas Con-
struction, a black-owned and longtime
Portland company.
The successful bid means Colas will
be responsible for the work to revamp the
Oregon Convention Center with a brand
new plaza, entries and interiors. The con-
struction will be done in conjunction with
the building of Portland’s first convention
hotel, a $244 million Hyatt Regency Port-
land, slated to open across the street from
the convention center in 2019. (See related
story, page 3)
Pay Dirt
for
Colas
Raimore Construction, another black-
owned construction firm from northeast
Portland, will partner with Colas on the
convention center remodel. Colas will
serve as the project’s construction manag-
er.
“It was definitely one of the most ex-
citing days of my construction career,”
said company executive and spokesman
Andrew Colas, about winning the Metro
contract last Aug. 31.
Colas grew up learning the business
from his father, Herman Colas, originally
from Haiti, who started the company in
1997.
“To just see, you know, that culmina-
tion of being a little kid walking around the
city with my father, looking at all the Hoff-
man tower cranes, my dad always telling
me that they were our competition. I’m just
really proud to have been given the oppor-
tunity to work on such an iconic building,”
Colas told the Portland Observer.
“My dad's the hardest working person
I've ever met. And just seeing that work
ethic that he practiced, but then instilled
in me, it's just so critical to being able to
be successful as a business person,” Colas
added.
He recalled his own interest in construc-
tion began at an early age.
“Any project I went by I wanted to look
at it, I wanted to study it, I wanted to un-
derstand how it worked,” he said. “I always
followed the plans, but I always felt like
I could build, you know, something even
better.”
The Oregon Convention Center’s orig-
inal construction was wrought with razing
housing in a historic black neighborhood
and garnered criticism from activist groups
like the Coalition of Black Men for not
C ontinueD on p age 7