2025 ARTBA Chair Jeff Nelson: Building from A to Z

by John Schneidawind, ARTBA vice president of public affairs

Jeff Nelson, who was elected 2024-2025 chair at ARTBA’s annual convention in September, epitomizes the journey many family-owned contractors take on their way to success.

Nelson’s journey begins in the early 1970s when his father, David, decided to pick up stakes and move his family from Greenville, Mich., to Largo, Fla., to build driveways for modular homes.

Armed with a pick-up truck and a broken shovel, Nelson’s father and mother teamed up to grow the fledgling business, which at the beginning also included a dump truck his mother drove when she was not working as a cashier at a local Publix to bring in steady income. There was also a roller the size of a golf cart, Jeff Nelson recalls.

“In a small family business, everybody needs to do their part,” Nelson said. “My job on weekends, holidays and summer breaks was helping my dad lay out parking lots on the back of a shovel, a jackhammer, or the roller.”

Today, Nelson is president of the Palm Harbor, Florida-based David Nelson Construction Co., which has grown into a heavy/civil and vertical general contractor that has worked on a veritable encyclopedia of transportation construction projects.

“We have served as prime contractors on everything from airports to zoos—or A to Z as we call it,” he jokes.

Nelson joined the company full-time in 1990 as a project engineer after graduating from the University of Florida. He was named president in 2008.

Besides the skills necessary to run a construction company, Nelson’s father also instilled in him the importance of networking with other family-owned businesses and being a voice for the industry in which he competes.

“My dad always had the philosophy that we need to be involved in the organizations that represent our business because what is good for the industry is good for us,” Nelson said. “We have lived that philosophy from the beginning.”

In Florida, that included making sure the industry had enough workers to build roads and bridges. In 2000, Nelson was on the joint Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT)/Florida Transportation Builders’ Association (FTBA) committee that planned and executed the state’s first “Construction Career Days.”

“He’s personable, he’s convincing, he’s very down-to-earth,” is the way Ananth Prasad, FTBA president, describes him. “He’s an owner-operator in the trenches working. When he says something, it’s not coming from a C-suite guy. It’s coming from a C-suite guy who also happens to be on the road, building projects.”

Nelson has been an ARTBA leader for 20 years, serving as senior vice chair, first vice chair, southern region vice chair, Strategic Planning Committee co-chair, Contractors Division president and first vice president, and Environmental Committee chair. He is a 2005 graduate of the ARTBA Foundation’s Industry Leader Development Program. In 2007, he was elected chair of FTBA.

“Jeff’s got a unique passion and energy that is infectious,” said Scott Pittman, executive vice president, Ajax Paving Industries of Florida, LLC. “He’ll go the extra mile to find the information to tell the story that we’re trying to get across. He’s proven he can do it before, and he’ll do it again.”

Pittman adds, “Just give him a problem, and he’ll get into it.”

“When ARTBA asked me to take on this role [as chair], I thought, ‘nobody cares what a little guy from Tampa has to say,’” Nelson recalled. “But the truth is that while decisions made in Washington, D.C. can affect Fortune 500 companies with a billion dollars of business, the impact can be exponential on the moms and pops of us who do not always have the resources to implement the new requirements.”

Communicating consistently and frequently with lawmakers on Capitol Hill and in state capitals across the country will be the hallmark of Nelson’s tenure as ARTBA chair, he promises.

“Whether it is ARTBA, FTBA, or your own state association, we have a louder voice when we speak together,” Nelson said. “If we do not actively engage with our senators and representatives for the right legislation, rules, regulations, and money, who is going to do that for us?”

“Every day that we are not communicating with Capitol Hill, someone else walks into those offices pushing for tougher regulations or trying to steal our money for who knows what,” he noted.

To that end, Nelson’s priorities for his year as ARTBA chair include:

1. Helping to secure the fiscal year 2025 highway and public transit investment levels called for in 2021’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).

2. Continuing to advance the industry’s IIJA policy priorities—such as meaningful project delivery reforms, a collaborative approach to Buy America expansion, and challenging the newly proposed heat standard from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). All are necessary to maximize the impact of federal-aid highway and public transportation improvements.

3. Building the case for the next multi-year surface transportation program renewal in 2026. With more than 60 new members in Congress next year, Nelson said the association must educate them about the value of current highway and transit policies, including formula-based distributions of funds and the need for further reforms.

4. Ensuring federal policies, including potential immigration reform, prioritize the protection and expansion of the transportation construction industry’s workforce.

To execute ARTBA’s strategy of shaping the transportation investment debate on Capitol Hill, Nelson has already established a member-led reauthorization task force. The group will be charged with developing the association’s legislative and regulatory policy recommendations for the next bill.

“The federal infrastructure law from 2021 reauthorized the highway and public transportation programs for five years,” Nelson said. “We are now in year-four of that law and the time is now to begin a full-throated effort to preserve and extend the progress our community has made under those investments.”