Since joining JE Dunn three years ago, Frey has served as Project Director and Vice President for the company’s South Central Aviation efforts — guiding aviation strategy and project delivery across multiple airports and carriers throughout Texas and Oklahoma. In addition to aviation, Marshall’s career portfolio includes projects in infrastructure, education, utilities, and complex building. This expansive background positions him to drive continued growth and operational excellence.

A Houston resident since 2013, Frey also is deeply invested in the city’s continued growth and success. His local industry insight will help strengthen JE Dunn’s regional presence while fostering stronger connections with clients, partners, and community stakeholders.

“Houston is home,” said Marshall. “It’s not just where I live, but where I see incredible opportunities for innovation and impact. I’m honored to lead this talented team as we continue to deliver exceptional projects that will shape our city for generations to come.”

Known for his energy, enthusiasm, and collaborative approach, Frey is passionate about supporting both client goals and team success. As Houston Office Leader, he will focus on strategically positioning and growing JE Dunn in the Bayou City.

“Marshall’s leadership, client focus, and passion for people make him an outstanding fit to lead our Houston office,” said Greg Lorei, President of the JE Dunn South Central Region. “We know he will continue to do great things for the team, our clients, and the broader Houston community.”

As part of this leadership transition, Hyde Griffith, who previously led JE Dunn’s Houston office, will shift his focus to supporting the company’s healthcare initiatives and future work program in the Houston market. The move will further strengthen JE Dunn’s specialized expertise in the fast-growth healthcare sector.

The post JE Dunn Construction Appoints Marshall Frey as Houston Office Leader first appeared on JE Dunn Construction.

Founded in 1976, The Advocacy Center is dedicated to promoting the healing of children and crime victims through advocacy, collaboration, prevention, and treatment.

“We are so thrilled and honored to receive this grant from JE Dunn Construction,” said Executive Director Aleigh Ascherl. “We are looking at significant grant budget reductions as we plan and budget for our next year, and JE Dunn has truly stood in that gap in funding for us.”

The Waco-based nonprofit will use the donation for their violence prevention programming. This initiative aims to reduce sexual violence by equipping K-12 students across six Texas counties with the tools to build healthy relationships and develop critical social-emotional skills through school-based group sessions and community outreach.

“Our Prevention and Education Department funding has been impacted the most, and this grant from JE Dunn will allow them to keep doing the important work they are doing in our schools, neighborhoods, and communities,” Ascherl added. “Educating young people, specifically, about healthy relationships creates healthier and safer communities, and we are so grateful JE Dunn is helping us continue towards that goal.”

The donation will support curriculum delivery, community engagement, and paid internships for local high school students, promoting both safety and economic opportunity.

The grant is part of JE Dunn’s Cornerstone Campaign, which expands the company’s existing annual giving by donating an additional $1 million+ each year. Charities across the United States were selected by employees and vetted by JE Dunn’s Community Impact team and national Cornerstone Committee.

JE Dunn employees chose “Access to safe and supportive spaces for kids in need” as the focus for the 2025 Cornerstone Campaign.

“We are thrilled to launch this new, employee-driven philanthropic strategy as part of our Community Impact. Our employees resoundingly chose to support organizations that create safe and supportive environments for kids in need,” said Nancy Phelps, JE Dunn Community Impact Director. “What an incredible honor to partner with our local communities in shaping a brighter future for the next generation.”

JE Dunn and its employees work to support the creation of safe spaces like community centers and youth clubs where children can socialize, develop, and engage in extracurricular activities. These efforts aim to reduce bullying and youth violence while fostering mental well-being and personal growth.

About The Advocacy Center

The Advocacy Center for Crime Victims and Children serves six central Texas counties by providing comprehensive services to victims of violent crime and child abuse and their families while creatively working to prevent those crimes from happening. Through advocacy, collaboration, counseling, and education, the center works to create true and lasting change to end violence and abuse. For nearly 50 years, the organization has been a trusted resource in Central Texas.

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Sophisticated, experienced healthcare construction partners offer these tools – helping  mitigate risks, ensuring scope and budget alignment, and ultimately helping facilitate decisions and investments that support a healthcare system’s long-term strategies and patient care priorities. 

Following the Hub-and-Spoke Model for Decentralization

Houston’s population sprawl continues to create opportunities for health systems to expand into previously underserved communities.

In areas like The Woodlands, Sugar Land, Katy, Cypress, and League City, providers are increasingly building new facilities. Some also are repurposing “big box” retail spaces and mixed-use developments into local outpatient and diagnostic imaging centers.

This strategic hub-and-spoke expansion enables health systems to maintain their primary  “hubs” in the Texas Medical Center, while also serving patients with complementary  “spoke facilities” in the suburbs.

By decentralizing their locations and services, providers can care for higher acuity patients on their main campus,  while allowing for lower acuity and outpatient care at their  perimeter locations. It also reduces the number of patients and families navigating bigger campuses’ large parking garages, skywalks and interconnected buildings – minimizing complications and frustrations.

For many large institutional healthcare providers, this hub-and-spoke model extends reach and relieves pressure on core campuses that are typically land-locked. For patients, it improves access to care while creating patient environments that are particularly convenient, welcoming, and efficient to utilize.

Crafting Future-Ready Healthcare Facilities

Healthcare continues to evolve rapidly, especially with the emergence of AI, digital diagnostics, larger, multi-disciplinary care teams, data-rich systems, and personalized treatment technologies. These innovations require:

• Flexible infrastructure that can adapt to next-generation technology.
• Delayed medical equipment procurement strategies to allow the selection of cutting-edge equipment as late in the process as reasonably possible.
• Scalable designs that accommodate shifting patient volumes and service lines.

Planning for future growth and expansion can be even more difficult in such a dynamic environment. Savvy owners often mitigate these challenges by engaging their construction partners as early as possible in project lifecycle, ideally during project definition.

This earlier construction involvement allows for more innovation and informed decision-making, resulting in more flexible, scalable and future-forward designs – while also ensuring scope and decisions align with budgets.

Financial and Programmatic Alignment Matter More Than Ever

Large, campus-wide projects have always benefited from early cost alignment and contingency budgeting. Similarly, owners are adopting the same proactive approaches for their suburban facilities to manage cost escalation and ensure ROI, regardless of the project’s size and scale.

General contractors can play a critical role in guiding clients through programmatic alignment with financial strategy to ensure business objectives and patient care priorities  are met,  despite fiscal constraints and economic uncertainty.

Early engagement with health systems and their design partners in the project definition phase   – while programming is still being determined – allows our healthcare experts to help owners confidently vet the right mix of facilities and square footage to maximize ROI.

Early engagement also allows our healthcare team to ensure Key Planning Units (KPUs) and complimentary service lines provide an integrated care experience for staff and patients. This approach often results in the business case for service lines that will drive increased patient care value, as well as the associated revenue for those services.

By prioritizing early engagement in the financial and programmatic alignment of a project, JE Dunn arms healthcare clients with real-time data, helping guide early scope and budget evaluations to make the best, data-informed decisions for their systems.

This process helps ensure:

• Efficient use of capital.
• Stronger return on investment.
• Maximized revenue per facility and services line.
• Better alignment with the owner’s patient-care models and objectives.

Looking Ahead: Optimization and Intentionality

Facilities built for the future, adaptability, and enhanced patient access are defining how Houston is transforming healthcare infrastructure as we know it.

Proactive involvement of all project partners during early planning efforts can eliminate delays and enhance innovation while positioning healthcare owners for greater success and returns on their investments in in both major metroplexes and suburban communities.

Successful healthcare projects will benefit from this more streamlined project delivery model, because it allows contractors and owners to directly impact both speed to market and project cost, especially in today’s dynamic, highly competitive healthcare landscape.

Suburban healthcare isn’t a fleeting trend. It’s a critical component of future-forward,   agile, patient-focused healthcare facilities. By engaging the right partners, strategies and project approaches at the right time, it’s a future Houston’s healthcare owners are well-equipped to deliver.

The post Healthcare is Moving to the Suburbs. Here’s What You Need to Know. first appeared on JE Dunn Construction.

Market Drivers

It’s a unique situation we are seeing in this part of the United States, and the nuances that created this amount of aviation construction include population growth, connectivity, and airport relationships with its city and local economy.

Population Growth

Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (AUS) is a prime example of airport capacity in relation to population growth. In May of 2023, Austin reached the top 10 most populous cities by the U.S. Census Bureau, which included Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. In 2022, AUS’ enplanements, or passengers that boarded at the airport, was 10.5 million. This is an increase of 55% compared to 2021.

Just recently at the Design-Build Institute of America (DBIA)-SW Regional Conference AUS leaders stated that the airport’s 2040 master plan will realistically hit in 2030. Right now, the airport is operating outside of its capacity.

Connectivity

Where AUS is growing its capacity and role in aviation on a local and national level, Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport has been operating on a national and international level for decades. For the second year in a row, DFW was ranked the second busiest airport in the world, with 73+ million passengers in 2022.

Its need for construction isn’t tied to the growth of its surrounding cities – at least not how it was in its early years. Rather, the demand comes from being a major hub for airlines and connectivity to other airports. About 60% of its traffic connects to another flight. Modernization, efficiency, and traveler experience are all goals for its expansion and continued reputation in the aviation market.

Capacity

The explosion of aviation work in Texas and parts of Oklahoma does include a middle ground, where airports are naturally growing with their general areas and in response to future capacity needs. This includes San Antonio International Airport and Tulsa International Airport. These individual programs are in the billions of dollars and include large, complex work that will be managed and constructed over several years.

In comparison to AUS enplanements, Tulsa and San Antonio, have a more moderate trend – although still indicating increase in travel and passenger numbers for the future.

Cargo Services

Beyond travel, airports are building capacity for additional cargo services. This focus happened during the pandemic when demand for fast delivery of essential and non-essential goods exploded.

That level of demand has come down with recent global impacts, fuel prices, supply chain bottlenecks, and the ease of port congestion. But there still exists a need for goods to be delivered securely, fast, and in large quantities.

Boeing released its report on air cargo through 2040 and projects that North America will average a 4.3% increase over the next decade. This will be led by e-commerce and a rise in domestic manufacturing.

This is the type of work AUS is invested in, where air cargo totaled more than 310+ million pounds in 2022, up almost 30 percent from 2021. In the last year, JE Dunn completed excavation and foundational work for AUS’ new 99,000 square foot cargo warehouse. This was a fast-track design and construction effort to get the facility up and running as soon as possible.

This aviation boom will lead to incredible opportunities for firms in the AEC industry but will bring impacts to the following:

• Trade partner and overall skilled worker capacity
• Opportunities for Minority, Women, Small, and Disadvantaged firms that meet their current capabilities while helping them build work capacity and experience
• Competition for workforce, labor, and retention with other large projects and multi-year projects in the the data center, manufacturing, government and municipal markets

This is top of mind for JE Dunn as we look to purse work in the aviation sector. Aviation will continues to be a leading market for our South Central region and it’s our responsibility to deliver projects that are successful, provide an excellent experience, and support the growth of our industry for the future.

The post The Aviation Boom first appeared on JE Dunn Construction.

As our project teams grow, we require more skilled workers onsite, and the speed of work tightens. No matter how fast we’re moving, we need to remember the priority of safety doesn’t change. What can change is how we behave onsite and our ability to identify and prevent safety accidents.

In our Texas and Oklahoma region, we’re focused on growing and evolving our safety culture. We are taking safety week (recognized in the construction industry from May 1 – 5) and turning it into a safety year so our team and our trade partners have the updated and current skills to master safety in today’s changing construction conditions.

This initiative kicks off May 1, 2023, and here’s what our Oklahoma and Texas project teams will be focused on:

Whole Team Training

In 2016, JE Dunn was intensely focused on sharing safety knowledge, outlining best practices, and shifting to a mindset of a true safety culture that is lived on and off the project site. It was such a successful push and I saw that on my first JE Dunn job at Dell Seton Medical Center at The University of Texas in Austin.

We need to do that again, but this time we need to extend that mindset to our greatest allies: trade partners. We’re preparing training and resources to increase their safety performance as we increase ours.

Speak Up, Listen Up (SULU) training will be provided to all our project teams and trade partners with the goal of 85%+ trained up this year. SULU breaks the communication barrier between skilled workers and project personnel. It promotes skilled workers to speak up when they know something isn’t right or safe. SULU is one of the best starting points to strengthen alignment between these groups.

Deliberate Safety Walks

Going out to the project, understanding the work happening, and looking with a safety lens is a deliberate effort. It’s easy for a safety walk to turn into a conversation about production – what’s being installed, what is coming up in two weeks, what will be the final product.
To challenge that default, our local leadership and project executives will conduct weekly safety walks with not just JE Dunn employees, but the people doing the work, and that includes evaluation of the Job Safety Analysis (JSA) for work in progress.

The takeaway from these walks is not to tell people what to do or what not do. We want our field teams and project teams to be equal partners in creating and maintaining a safe project site.

Preventative Safety Management

One of the best ways we can strengthen our safety culture is to start thinking about how we prevent an injury rather than identifying a resolution to the injury after the fact. Training and safety walks will set a foundation for preventative safety, but so will the following.

• Attention to our frontline workers who are at the highest risk of injury It’s our job to ensure they are trained, supported, and can self-evaluate situations while also bringing it to JE Dunn’s attention.
• One-on-one time with trade partners so we can discuss their specific safety concerns and roles onsite. Teams in our Austin office have already started these efforts by hosting meetings with trade partner leadership and bringing them into meetings to give them more visibility of project goals.
• Focus on control plans that go beyond ensuring workers are wearing their safety gloves but rather identify and eliminate hazards before work is put in place. Think of it this way: If production requires a schedule, quality control requires mockups and first install preparations, then safety requires total project inspection.

With this initiative, we are building long-term behaviors that aim to prevent anything that puts our people’s safety at risk, and we’re bringing all our partners with us. Because knowing how to climb a ladder safely is just scratching the safety surface. Everyone needs to know how to inspect and identify the conditions of the ladder. Everyone needs to know how to inspect and identify the surrounding environment. And everyone should have the power to speak up for themselves and everyone on the project because they deserve to go home safely. That is the real depth of a culture of safety.

Marco Martinez is the Safety Director for JE Dunn’s Texas and Oklahoma region. Marco has been a part of the JE Dunn Safety Department since 2014 having worked on projects such as the Dell Seton Medical Center at The University of Texas, Covenant Health Hope Tower Addition, and Loews Arlington Hotel.

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