Bill O'Driscoll

bodriscoll@rgj.com

After months of waiting, the owners of Reno's F and P Construction got the call they'd been hoping for on the afternoon of June 26.

Could they get going — and fast — on moving dirt at Tahoe Reno Industrial Center for what they knew was a really big but secret-to-the-public project, and have a pad leveled and ready within a month?

You bet, Cindy Pitts, F and P co-owner, recalled Friday, a day after electric car maker Tesla Motors confirmed rumors that it had broken ground at the center, thereby elevating Nevada to a finalist for Tesla's coveted lithium-ion battery gigafactory that will cost $4 billion-$5 billion and create 6,500 jobs.

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When F and P officials first heard in February of Tesla's interest in the region, Pitts said, they got busy hounding the general contractor, Miss.-based Yates Construction.

"We wanted it so bad. We wanted it for Nevada," said Pitts, who was bound then by a nondisclosure agreement to speak openly but is free to speak now that Tesla has made the venture public. "We just kept telling them we'd be the guys to do it."

She pointed to other road and grading projects F and P has done at TRIC, including the site near the Tesla location that houses online retailer Zulily.

So when Yates called at 2:30 p.m. that day in June, F and P didn't hesitate. What followed, Pitts said, was as impressive a contract job as she's ever seen.

She did not disclose the contract's cost but outlined the scale of F & P's work.

"We hired 250 men and women in the next week. We brought in $65 million worth of equipment — 200 pieces of equipment, bulldozers, excavators, haul trucks," she said.

In 3 1/2 weeks, her crews moved an estimated 3 million cubic yards of dirt and brush and leveled a pad big enough to hold a 5 million-square-foot building — more than five times the size of Amazon.com's distribution warehouse in Fernley.

"We ran 24 hours a day, seven days a week. These men and women broke records," Pitts said. "We knew we had to get it done by July 21 when Panasonic was going to come in. We built that pad in less than 30 days."

Indeed, a week after Panasonic's visit, the company signed an agreement with Tesla as a major partner in the gigafactory venture.

With the agreement in hand, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, in a letter to shareholders Thursday, divulged his company's work at TRIC.

But he also said the site, 17 miles east of Sparks in Storey County, is not Tesla's final choice. He said he expects to start similar work in one or two other states before a final site is selected "in the coming months."

Even so, Pitts said she's proud of her company's work at TRIC, performed away from onlookers kept back by fencing and a guarded gate on Portofino Drive.

Pitts said her staff, idle at least for the present now that the pad at TRIC has been readied, showed Tesla that Nevada can handle the challenge.

"We told our men and women they were making history," she said. "We paid them bonuses for working extra hours. As they got tired, we upped the wages. We fed them on the site. Nevada men and women met the challenge."

TRIC developer Lance Gilman has seen lots of dirt moved at the 106,000-acre business park since it opened in 2000, and on Friday he called F and P Construction's performance at the Tesla site "unprecedented."

"Building that pad in three and a half weeks was biblical," Gilman said. "Work has not stopped. There's still ongoing things, building catch basins, rerouting flood control, bank stabilization. But the pad is finished. It's ready."

Now, he said, all that's needed is a final green light from Tesla. While Tesla pursues sites for the same kind of work elsewhere, including California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, Gilman said construction products are already on order.

"All the steel has been ordered," he said. "Those things take a lot of lead time. But I don't think that signals anything for us. They could always move it somewhere else, I guess. But this all points to us at least heading in the right direction."

Pitts agreed.

"We showed it could be done, and now we're hoping to go forward," she said. "We're keeping the site wet so there's no dust. We're telling our people, be ready to go. We're just waiting for the green light."