Late last year, the National Academy of Construction honored the Wyoming State Capitol Project with its 2025 Recognition of Special Achievement Award. As construction manager for this work, JE Dunn was recognized for delivering outstanding innovation and leading an exemplary safety program that educated the nearly 4,000 workers who had a hand in restoring the National Historic Landmark.
Inside its then-newly built capitol, “the People’s House,” Wyoming made history as the first U.S. territory — and later U.S. state — to recognize women’s right to vote. When the state approached construction partners to revitalize the National Historic Landmark, JE Dunn Construction made sure its restoration efforts focused on just that: the people.
Beginning in 2015 — four years before the state’s 150th anniversary of women’s suffrage — JE Dunn acted as the construction manager overseeing restoration of the historic 130,000-square-foot state capitol, renovation of the 360,800-square-foot Hershler Office Building, and modifications to the underground connector gallery that serves as a tunnel for the Capitol Square. The project was complex, requiring the help of nearly 4,000 employees to replace outdated building systems, add critical life-saving infrastructure, and restore historic building finishes and features.
Partnering for safety
Thorough and on-going education for everyone working on site was key to ensuring the complexity of the project didn’t negatively impact the consistency or quality of the final results. To do this, the state government highly encouraged JE Dunn to work with Wyoming OSHA, which at that time primarily focused on oil, gas, and agriculture. This project was JE Dunn’s first opportunity to collaborate with Wyoming OSHA in its history, let alone on a construction project of this scale from start to finish.
“When the project started, many trades weren’t familiar with the safety requirements of a large-scale construction project,” said Cory Willingham, JE Dunn Senior Safety Manager. “That was a challenge right out of the gate, but our influence, our partnership with Wyoming OSHA, and our trade partners’ buy-in really propelled everyone forward.”
To foster a closer, more transparent working relationship with OHSA and help their team members better understand JE Dunn’s safety culture, JE Dunn hosted meetings every Friday with Wyoming OSHA, trade partners, supervisors, and management to present and discuss project activities. The meetings ended with site walks, where JE Dunn, trade partners, and Wyoming OSHA leaders had a chance to look for potential hazards, evaluate progress, and make corrections as needed. The weekly meetings helped foster a deeper relationship, where construction crew members and trade partners felt comfortable calling Wyoming OSHA when questions came up or to consult on different parts of the complex project.
“We got to a point where not only JE Dunn, but also our trade partners saw that we’re all in this together. We’re all working towards the same goal here,” Willingham said.
Partnering for community
In addition to partnering with the state’s OSHA team, the state government prioritized having JE Dunn hire Wyoming-based trade partners and crew members to complete the work where possible. This led to a robust mentorship program that invited people with no previous construction experience to learn the skills, tools, and safety protocols needed to complete quality construction labor. Each new crew member was assigned to work closely with a mentor for roughly 90 days with clear milestones set to track progress and evaluate what they had mastered. New mentees wore green hard hats throughout the project, so more senior crew members could help out, answer questions, or offer feedback as they got their bearings.
Today, the mentorship program has been woven into an ongoing partnership JE Dunn has maintained with Caterpillar Inc. across other projects in the state.
Partnering for history
Throughout construction, JE Dunn also worked closely with capitol staff and the Wyoming State Museum as teams uncovered different finishes and artifacts from years past.
“It was incredible. We found all sorts of stuff. We found a door hidden behind a wall that was in its original state. Some of the flooring had posters on the bottoms of it for operas or musicals that had come to town. We found a calendar from 1928 completely intact. It had fallen behind a bunch of filing cabinets and sat there for almost 100 years,” Willingham said.
The state museum was able to preserve some of the items found during the project in an exhibit. The partnership also helped JE Dunn and trade partners evaluate and confirm which finishes were original, for instance, by scraping back layers of paint from previous renovations to find the original colors used when the structure was first built.
Each of these partnerships had lasting impacts that have extended beyond the Capitol Square Project. To date, the programs and relationships JE Dunn built with Wyoming OSHA during the capitol work have informed or been carried over to other collaborations, like the two newly completed student housing buildings for the University of Wyoming and a new data center in Cheyenne. With a shared vision and mutual commitment to doing the right thing by protecting the lives and legacy that mattered most, JE Dunn and its partners built new pathways to create exciting and safe spaces in the West.
