REBNY president Steve Spinola confirms Coletti's plans as well as the board's participation. "We're going to do anything we can to plan the work that's going to be done over the next few years. Lou's group permits the coordination of the people who actually do the building: the contractors and the unions."

"We have suspended any normal mediation and arbitration procedures on existing construction sites," Coletti tells GlobeSt.com. "They will be handled immediately with final decisions made by me and Ed Malloy and will be binding on all trades." A committee has also been assembled to take charge of cleanup issues. It includes Malloy, Frank McArdle, managing director of the General Contractors Association of New York and Ray McGuire, general counsel for the Association of Contracting Plumbers. "They will negotiate all contracts for the cleanup," Coletti says. Their primary responsibility is collective bargaining."

With many ongoing projects back on track, upcoming cleanup operations need to be coordinated to make the most of the labor force. "Most of the skilled tradesmen have already gone back to their jobs. So we need to coordinate the manpower with the management that will be needed shortly on the cleanup."

What the group is waiting on with regard to the cleanup is governmental approval. "Where we go from here is the unanswered question. We've asked them to tell us." Coletti says city and state officials are expected to provide the authorization requirements and funding sources that will enable the group to move into place as soon as recovery operations and disaster assessments have been completed.

Coletti says apprenticeship classes are being organized to ramp up the labor force and hints at a larger project under discussion, "broader than the three million sf," though he won't comment further. But it is getting the city's office-space inventory back in shape that is Coletti's first mission and he says no city is as equipped as New York to get such a large-scale job done right.

"The building trades' biggest asset in response to a crisis is that the New York City construction industry is organized. It's like one-stop shopping dealing with these issues. We can pull the entire construction industry together, put teams together quickly. You can't do that in any other city in the country."