by Addy Combs

Every summer, we see a few new faces: high schoolers on break, college students home for the summer, and young men enrolled in construction trade programs. We don’t see these as just summer jobs. The trades are facing a real shortage of skilled workers, and too many young people never get shown what a career in construction can look like. Our summer crew works alongside our team, learning the tools, and picking up real, hands-on skills. For some, it’s a chance to apply what they’re learning in school. For others, it might be the first spark toward an apprenticeship or a full career in the trade. 

Prairie Construction has grown because our community has supported us, and investing in local young people is one of the best ways we know to give back. Skilled labor built this region, and giving the next generation a real, paid opportunity to explore that path is work we’re proud to do. 

To this summer’s crew: thank you for your hard work and energy. Wherever you go next, we’re glad to have been part of your journey! 

At Prairie Construction, our strength comes from our people. Today, we’re sending off a true legend as Project Superintendent Steve Vencil officially enters retirement!

Steve joined us in the early days when co-founders Paul and Frank were just starting Prairie Construction. Bringing background as a stockbroker, an ironworker, and a skilled tradesman, Steve quickly became a cornerstone of our team.

Over the decades, Steve has led some of our most memorable builds, from school projects across town and the Event Facility at Mahoney State Park to the race-against-the-clock third-base grandstand at Rosenblatt Stadium ahead of the College World Series.

As Steve Rease noted during Steve’s 30th anniversary: “You don’t find guys like Steve every day. He manages projects expertly onsite, crews love working with him, and you always know where you stand.”

Steve’s decades of dedication highlight a core belief here at Prairie Construction: our crew is our family. We make it a point to celebrate employee service milestones every 5 years to recognize the loyalty, craft, and leadership that keep our projects moving. Steve set the bar high for what a long, successful career in construction looks like.

Steve, thank you for your decades of hard work, integrity, and mentorship. Your impact is built into the foundation of both our community and our company culture.

Please join all of us at Prairie Construction in wishing Steve the very best in his well-deserved retirement!

Prairie Construction Company was proud to serve as an official sponsor of the Elkhorn 13U/14U youth baseball team for their season. 

Supporting local athletics is a core value at Prairie Construction. Beyond building quality commercial and educational facilities across Nebraska, we believe in investing in the next generation of leaders through sports, teamwork, and active community involvement. 

We want to congratulate the players, coaches, and families of the Elkhorn 13U/14U baseball team on a fantastic season of hard work and teamwork. 

Prairie Construction Company was honored to serve as an official sponsor of the Greeley Days Rodeo, which took place July 18th and 19th. 

Community involvement is a fundamental part of our mission at Prairie Construction. Beyond delivering quality commercial and industrial construction projects across the region, we are committed to supporting local traditions, regional events, and the communities where our team and clients live and work. 

This year’s Greeley Days Rodeo brought together families, local businesses, and rodeo fans from across Nebraska for two action-packed days of competition and community celebration. As a local construction company built on teamwork, grit, and strong relationships, standing behind an event that reflects those same values was a natural fit. 

Did you know that renovating one part of a commercial building can sometimes require accessibility upgrades to areas you didn’t plan on touching? Under federal ADA standards, alterations made to a building’s primary function area require the accessible path of travel to that area, including entrances, restrooms, and parking, to also be upgraded, up to a cost cap of 20 percent of the original alteration’s cost. Elevators generally aren’t required in smaller facilities, but restrooms, telephones, and drinking fountains serving the renovated area typically do need to be brought up to standard. 

This catches a lot of commercial property owners off guard mid-project, especially in older Omaha buildings constructed under different code requirements decades ago. It’s not a reason to avoid renovating, but it is a reason to loop in your contractor and the city’s building department early, before a budget and scope are finalized. 

If you’re planning a commercial renovation this summer, ask your contractor what compliance triggers might apply before you lock in your project scope. 

Every growing business eventually runs into the same wall. Maybe your staff has outgrown the floor plan, your warehouse inventory has spilled into the aisles, or your dining room is turning away customers at peak hours. Knowing you’ve outgrown your space is the easy part. Knowing whether to expand or build new is where the decision-making starts, and Omaha’s mid-summer conditions are worth factoring in either way. 

A useful starting point: most commercial offices are planned around 150 to 250 square feet per employee, with 10 to 20 percent built in for near-term growth. If your headcount has pushed well past that range, the space itself is likely the constraint, not your operations. Expansion makes sense when your current site and infrastructure can support added square footage; building new is the better option when the lot is landlocked or the structure can’t support an addition without major rework. 

July also shapes how a project gets scheduled. It’s hot and humid, and still within Nebraska’s severe weather window: the May-through-July stretch accounts for roughly 75 percent of the state’s tornadoes. Heat itself is a serious factor too: construction workers make up only about 6 percent of the U.S. workforce but have accounted for more than a third of occupational heat-related deaths from 1992 to 2016. Experienced contractors plan around this by starting exterior work early in the morning and adjusting crew schedules during the hottest part of the afternoon, so your timeline should account for it from the start rather than be surprised by it midway through.  

Cost comparisons aren’t always intuitive. Expansion is often cheaper when it ties into existing utilities, but an addition requiring structural reinforcement or zoning variances can close the gap with new construction fast. 

If your business has reached that tipping point, Prairie Construction can help you evaluate both paths, factoring in your timeline, budget, and what this summer’s weather means for getting it done right. 

Did you know that even in the middle of a hot, humid Omaha summer, commercial foundations still have to go just as deep as they would in January? Omaha’s building code requires footings to extend at least 42 inches below the finished ground surface, per the city’s municipal code, the depth needed to get below the frost line that forms most winters. When moisture in the soil freezes and expands, the resulting frost heave can generate lifting forces as high as 50,000 pounds per square foot in extreme cases, more than enough to crack a slab or shift a foundation if footings aren’t placed deep enough. 

It might seem unintuitive to dig down that far for a summer construction project, but the code doesn’t adjust for the season the work happens to take place in. A building’s foundation has to perform through every winter it will ever see, not just the one it was poured in. 

If your business is planning an addition or new commercial building this summer, this is one of the details your contractor should already be accounting for in the site plan, regardless of how warm it is outside right now.