Government contracts pay for KI, Oshkosh Corp., other area companiesd

 

U.S. government major customer in economic downturn

 

By Pete Bach, Gannett Wisconsin Media

Northeastern Wisconsin boasts several companies that have done handsomely thanks to Uncle Sam.
Institutional furniture maker and designer Krueger International in Bellevue — known simply as KI — is among them.

It has rung up $76 million in government work this year, much of it under contract with the Department of Justice Bureau of Prisons. The company puts tooling and equipment into federal prisons.

The state has drawn a much larger proportion of federal contract work in recent years.

"It's gone up dramatically since 2000," said Aina Vilumsons, executive director of the Wauwatosa-based Wisconsin Procurement Institute that helps companies land government contracts. "In times of economic distress, companies find it can be lucrative to do business with the government."

Schutt Industries, Clintonville, won a nearly $100 million contract from the U.S. Army in 2007.

"This year alone we were awarded $50 million-plus," said Jim Schutt, president.

The company just marked delivery of its 5,500th trailer used to haul generators for mobile communications equipment in hot battlegrounds in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Marinette Marine Corp., a builder of vessels for the U.S. Navy, had booked nearly $86 million in work.
Even Dallas-based Kimberly-Clark Corp., which employs about 4,000 people in the Fox Cities, got in on the action, ringing up $17.9 million-worth of business supplying consumer hygiene products to commissaries on military bases, spokeswoman Kay Jackson said.

Specialty vehicle maker Oshkosh Corp. is the poster child for government contracts. It has booked about $2.7 billion worth of work for the U.S. Army, a commanding 59 percent share of the state total. So successful this cycle has the maker of mine-resistant specialty vehicles become that its military contracts land it 11th on the top 100 list of federal contract recipients through part of the third fiscal 2009 quarter, only a few notches down from giants like Lockheed Martin Corp., Northrup Grumman Corp. and General Dynamics.

"It's a good reflection of the products we make," said Oshkosh spokesman John Daggett. "It took a lot of hard work. A lot of people put in a lot of time to go after that" business.

But it's not just defense work that has built up the top line for federal contractees from the region.

Masonry contractor Julio De Arteaga's 65-person firm in Greenville partnered with Miron Construction, the big town of Menasha contractor, on a $28 million Department of Labor project for a new Wisconsin Job Corps center in Milwaukee.

Dean Basten, Miron's chief financial officer, said the Job Corps contract was awarded Dec. 30.

The joint venture let De Arteaga leverage Miron's bonding capacity and exercise the Greenville firm's Small
Business Administration standing to pre-qualify for the eight-building campus. Basten said the process of pairing with De Arteaga began in 2007.

Basten said the pair-up will produce more dividends under a joint venture to put up a group of maintenance facilities at Fort McCoy, near Sparta, where De Arteaga has performed work for many years.

"The bottom line is it's been a good relationship with De Arteaga," Basten said.

Source: FedSpending.org

Additional Facts
Top 10 Wisconsin contractors

 

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