acec-ca 02-10 newsltr · level or on one of the many state committees. also attending our monthly...

President’s Message

By: Bob LoRusso, President

Happy New Year! It was a very busy

January and a great way to start the

year. We were the host chapter for

the ACEC-CA Annual Conference,

Legislative Visit Day and Engineer’s

Excellence Awards Dinner. They

were great successes. To all those

that attended these events, a sincere

thank you! It was beneficial, informative and a great

experience, especially for any first timers out there.

Special thanks go to the ACEC-CA staff who work so hard

to make these events possible. It’s great to know that we

have a competent staff working very hard on our behalf.

As you all know, California is in the middle of yet another

budget crisis. The “budget can” continues to be kicked

down the street year after year but I think finally, as a

state, we are at a dead end. Our state faces a lot of

(Continued on page 4)

CALENDAR OF EVENTS

Meetings are at the Sacramento Hilton unless otherwise noted.

5:00pm - 6:00pm Board Meeting

6:00pm - 6:30pm Networking /

6:30pm General Membership Dinner Meeting

Member Cost: $35 - Non-Member $50

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

(Note Date Change from February 17, 2010)

Board and General Membership Dinner Meeting

Guest Speaker: Louay Owaidat, President and CEO

of Magnus Pacific

Topic: Geotechnical Techniques for Flood Control

Friday, February 26, 2010

Managing Employee Challenges in a Down Economy

Nolte (Sacramento)

(www.acec-ca.org for more information)

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

2010 NAVFAC Symposium

San Diego

(www.acec-ca.org for more information

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Board and General Membership Dinner Meeting

Guest Speaker: John Maguire, City of Folsom

Topic: Downtown Folsom Revitalization Project

February 2010

In This Issue

Geotechnical Techniques for Flood Control— February

Meeting Topic and Speaker. 2

State Board Meeting, Legislative Visit Day —Recap 2

Joint APWA/ACEC January Meeting—Recap 2

Northwest Hydraulic Consultants (NHC)—Company Profile 3

President’s Message—cont. 4

Speeding Up Transportation Article 5

Speeding Up Transportation—cont. 6

Engineering Excellence Award Winners 6

Board of Directors 7

Page No. 2 ACEC California/Sierra Chapter Newsletter - February 2010

Geotechnical Techniques for Flood Control—February Meeting Topic and Speaker Submitted by: Eli Aramouni, Board Director

Lake in Tempe, Arizona. Louay is also instrumental in

leading his company to the successful completion of

hundreds of flood protection projects in Northern Cali-

fornia. Louay serves on the Board of Directors for the

Sacramento Section of the Construction Institute and

has been nominated for the ASCE Construction Man-

agement Award.

Louay Owaidat, President and CEO of Magnus Pacific,

a heavy Civil Construction Company based in Sacra-

mento will be the speaker for our February meeting. Mr.

Owaidat has successfully managed over $400 million

dollars worth of complex and sensitive projects includ-

ing the largest soil-cement-bentonite cutoff wall along

the American River in Sacramento, the largest set-back

levee in Northern California, and the Rio Salado Town

January Recap: Joint APWA/ACEC Meeting—Tim Quinn, ACWA Submitted by: Marco Palilla, Chapter Vice President

ACEC CA held its 71st Meeting of the Board of Direc-

tors on January 17, 2010. Attendance was good de-

spite being held on a stormy Sunday afternoon. Private

sector advocate and ACEC California’s Legislator of the

Year Senator Dennis Hollingsworth made an appear-

ance to receive this year’s award at the Board meeting.

He was not able to attend the luncheon on Legislative

Visit Day as he was traveling with Governor Schwar-

zenegger in Washington, D.C.

The most significant action of the meeting was a vote

by the Board to reconsider initiating legislation to make

it a violation of the PE and LS Acts for engineers and

land surveyors to fail to comply with existing QBS stat-

ues. Based upon the Board’s approval to initiate legis-

lation on the matter at the October meeting it had been

slated as one of the major talking points going into Leg-

islative Visit Day. The re-vote means there will be fur-

ther discussion of the matter and that it will not make the

February deadline.

Another highlight of the meeting was Secretary-

Treasurer Eddie Kho’s presentation of the recent techni-

cal tour of the United Arab Emirates.

The next Board Meeting will be held via conference call

and is scheduled for April 13, 2010.

January Recap: State Board Meeting, Legislative Visit Day Submitted by: Christopher Curtis, State Director

If you missed our annual joint meet-

ing with the Sacramento Chapter of

APWA, then you missed an out-

standing event. Our guest speaker,

Tim Quinn, Executive Director of

ACWA (Association of California Wa-

ter Agencies), spoke to a packed

room on the evolution of water sup-

ply in California. He pointed out that our current water

supply infrastructure (State Water Project, Central Val-

ley Project, Colorado River Aqueduct, Hetch Hetchy

System, Los Angeles Aqueduct, Mokelumne River Aq-

ueduct, etc.) were all built on extraction based policies

that pretty much ignored environmental concerns. In the

future, these systems must be operated to achieve envi-

ronmental and economic sustainability. Mr. Quinn pointed

out the critical role of the Governor’s Delta Vision Blue

Ribbon Task Force (led by Phil Isenberg) that led to a

Comprehensive Delta Water Package that was passed by

the California Legislature last Fall. It will force agencies to

manage their water supply systems based on co-equal

goals. Co-equal goals means the two goals of providing a

more reliable water supply for California and protecting,

restoring, and enhancing the Delta ecosystem. This policy

is a dramatic change from the ways of the past. Mr. Quinn

wrapped up his talk with a lively Q&A session.

the Sacramento Regional Wastewater Treatment Plant for use by plant engineers; erosion site assessment and control mitigation designs for numerous sites adjacent to the Sacramento and American Rivers for the Corps of Engineers, Sacramento Regional Flood Control Agency, and the City of West Sacramento; and development of the Pollutant Load Reduction Model for prioritizing stormwater control and water quality enhancements in the Lake Tahoe basin.

NHC also has ongoing hydraulic engineering services contracts with the Sacramento and San Francisco District Corps of Engineers, and provides specialty hydrologic and hydraulic technical services to the Corps Hydrologic Engineering Center in Davis, California.

For more information about NHC, visit our website at www.nhcweb.com

Sacramento Contact:

BradHall,P.E., [email protected]

916.371.7400


An ACEC-CA Company Profile

GET NOTICED IN THE SIERRA CHAPTER NEWSLETTER!

Would you like to see YOUR FIRM listed on this page? ACEC-CA/Sierra Chapter firms in good standing

are invited to submit a company profile for inclusion in this newsletter. Firms

that have not been featured in the last two years are invited to partici-

pate again.

Contact Marco Palilla for submission details.

Point of Contact:

Marco Palilla

HDR Engineering, Inc.

(916) 817-4878

(916) 817-4747 (fax)

[email protected]

Physical model testing of flow dis-tribution at the Sacramento Re-

Northwest Hydraulic Consultants (NHC) is a consulting firm focused exclusively in the area of water resources. Founded in 1972, the firm is made up of dedicated engineers and

geoscientists who specialize in hydraulic and hydrologic engineering, water resource engineering, river engineering, fluvial morphology, aquatic habitat restoration, and numerical and physical modeling. NHC has completed thousands of assignments, the majority of them in the western U.S. and western Canada. NHC has a current staff of over 120, with permanent full-service offices in: Sacramento, South Lake Tahoe, and Pasadena, CA; Seattle, WA; North Vancouver, B.C.; and Edmonton, Alberta. Three physical modeling laboratories are maintained in Vancouver, Edmonton and Seattle.

Opened in 1994, NHC’s West Sacramento office employs a staff of 18. The South Lake Tahoe office opened in 2007 to provide focused services in the Lake Tahoe basin. Both offices focus on providing floodplain mapping, river engineering, fish passage and riparian habitat enhancement engineering, stormwater modeling and design, erosion assessment, and other hydrotechnical engineering services along the California Coast, throughout the Central Valley and Sierra Nevada, and in Nevada.

Recent projects include building and testing a physical model of contact tanks and inflow control weirs onsite at

NHC identified critical erosion sites around Natomas and developed bioengineered erosion control plans

for reducing the erosion risk in the region

Physical model testing of flow distribution at the

Sacramento Regional Wastewater Treatment Plant

NHC led the development of the Pollutant Load Reduction Model for stormwater plan-ning and design in the Lake Tahoe Basin


President’s Message (continued)

challenges in the areas of transportation, infrastructure,

environmental, water supply, and flood control. The one

thing these all have in common is that engineers are

actively involved in all these areas. No matter the

service, whether it’s surveying, design, construction

management, or environmental, our members are in the

thick of it working on projects that significantly affect our

state. So it makes perfect sense that we be involved

with providing solutions to these difficult and complex

issues. Our organization provides us a seat at the table,

but it will be all of you

that will determine

whether we are

influential and effective

in that seat. With out

your active participation

ACEC-CA becomes

just one of the many

other business

organizations out

there. However, what

separates ACEC-CA

from all the other groups is its relevance and

importance in providing real world solutions, not only to

the physical infrastructure, which is critical to the

economic viability of the state, but to the political

infrastructure. ACEC-CA is continually called upon to

provide information and expertise to policy makers and

ACEC-CA takes an active roll in the legislative process

by reviewing and taking positions on hundreds of bills

each year.

(Continued from page 1)

The bottom line is we need more participation from

our members if we want to maintain our relevance.

This can be done by serving at the chapter board

level or on one of the many state committees. Also

attending our monthly dinner meetings is a great

way to stay at the forefront of the issues. I’m going to

do my part by passing on relevant articles that affect

our industry. Some of you may have already noticed

that a few articles have already been passed on for

your reading pleasure. One such article by ACEC-

CA President, Tom Blackburn, was in the Capitol

Weekly recently and highlights some of our issues

with transportation projects and the public employee

unions. This article is also included in this month’s

newsletter, just in case some of you missed it.

It’s important to remember that our organization is

comprised of volunteer members. It’s up to us to

take the bull by the horns and do something. I

encourage all of you to give me a call or send me an

email letting me know what you think we as an

organization should be doing or shouldn’t be doing.

This is YOUR organization and it’s important that all

of us start speaking up so we can keep our industry

strong. If we don’t, then we have no one to blame

but ourselves. We are problem solvers so let’s start

solving these problems!

Cheers

Finally, congratulation are in order for John and Lisa Thut. (You all

know and love our Lisa who has for many years faithfully sat through

board meetings and currently serves as the ACEC newsletter edi-

tor.) After waiting two weeks past her due date, they welcomed their

first child, John Ryan Thut (aka “Johnny”) on January 7,

2010. Johnny arrived weighing 6 pounds and was 20” long. We

wish the family many healthy, happy years ahead.

Rob Salaber, Bob LoRusso, Roger

Niello at EEA Banquet


This month the Legislature

and Governor

Schwarzenegger will once

again begin to fashion a

state budget, and while the

specific provisions of that

effort are still unknown, the fact that that budget will

have a big impact on the future of our state is

anything but. The latest projections are that, unless

the state changes its basic budget provisions, over

the next 18 months the state will be in the red by

about $20 billion…and counting.

How did we get here? Well, one clear reason is the

state bureaucracy is growing bigger and more

expensive and is becoming an ever-larger drain on

our state coffers. A case in point: Over the past

decade Caltrans’ (i.e. our State Department of

Transportation or DOT) in-house staff for delivering

projects has more than doubled in size (mostly before

Governor Schwarzenegger took office).

The primary reason for this dramatic expansion is that

powerful state employee unions use their clout in the

state budget process to create union jobs and

severely restrict the state’s use of engineering

companies. As a result, Caltrans uses private

engineering companies for only a small portion of its

work (about 10 per cent). The other 90 per cent of

Caltrans’ project work is handled by full-time long

term state employees on the state payroll—making

California’s DOT more financially committed to the

use of permanent state employees than any other

state in the nation.

Indeed the national average among the other 49

DOTs is to use private engineering firms for over 50

per cent of their workload. Other DOTs do so,

because then they can quickly access special

expertise when they need it and just as quickly

terminate those services when they no longer need it.

Amazingly, state employee unions claim that using

private engineering companies for bridge and road

design is too expensive and results in substandard

services.

First, let’s talk about costs. When state employee

unions talk about it, they compare apples and

oranges. For the cost of a state employee, public unions

only count salary, benefits and a few direct costs. But

for the cost of a private sector engineer, the public

unions count all of the overhead and support assistance

that an engineer needs in order to do his or her job.

Even more significantly, public employee unions ignore

the fact that state employee engineers stay on the

state’s payroll long after a project is complete. In

contrast, once a private engineer finishes a state project,

the engineer moves on to work on another project for

another client, and the state no longer owes that

engineering firm anything. One only has to consider the

state’s huge unfunded liability for state employee

pensions and medical care, to understand that the

difference between hiring a permanent state employee

and the cost of procuring a particular service for a limited

time is a huge cost difference.

We currently suffer from the worst

of two trends: Caltrans is way

overstaffed and must still pay those

staffing costs, while at the same

time there is now little new money available for new

projects. It is no surprise then—though largely unknown

to motorists—that the state gas tax is now substantially

used to pay for state employees, not new projects.

Second, what about the quality of services provided by

engineering companies? In a service business such as

engineering, the ability to win and retain business is

inevitably in direct proportion to the quality of the

services provided. Private companies do not stay in

business—and their employees do not stay employed—

(Continued on page 6)

Speeding Up Transportation Projects Benefits Everyone By: Tom Blackburn, ACEC CA President


Speeding Up Transportation Projects Benefits Everyone (continued)

Meanwhile, California’s need for high quality, cost

effective engineering services has never been

greater. A recent national report found that California’s

all too often congested, deficient roads cost motorists an

estimated $40 billion per year due to higher operating

costs, crashes and delays (www.tripnet.org).

California’s future will hold even more financial peril—

unless the state makes basic changes in the way it

conducts business and provides services. By opening

the door to smarter use of the private sector to deliver

needed transportation projects, California can create

sustainable jobs, speed up project delivery, help grow

our economy and expand our tax base.

if they provide poor service. The same cannot be

said, unfortunately, of a state bureaucracy where, as

everyone knows, it is far more difficult to reward high

performance and weed out poor performers.

Frankly, the state’s current practice of severely

restricting the use of private engineering companies is

not sustainable and ignores opposite trends across

the country. The status quo is a recipe for even

greater fiscal disaster in California. The alternative to

simply using private services when needed—adding

more jobs at the state level—will further exacerbate

the unfunded pension liability bombshells facing the

taxpayers in coming years.

(Continued from page 5)

The winners of ACEC

California’s 2010 Engi-

neering Excellence

Awards were announced

on January 19 during

ceremonies held at the

Hyatt Regency in Sacra-

mento. The Golden

State Award went to

HDR Engineering for the

Gill’s Advanced Energy

Recovery System in Ox-

nard, California. Gills On-

ions uses 100% of their

onion waste by turning it

into juice and pulp; the

amount solid waste is reduced by 75% while the juice

is converted to methane via an anaerobic digester.

The methane is then cleanly burned to power 600 kilo-

watt fuel cells, supplying enough clean electricity to

run 460 homes. It is estimated that Greenhouse gas

emissions are reduced by about 30,000 tons per year.

Winning Projects within the Sierra Chapter include an

Honor Award for Folsom Lake Crossing (CH2M Hill

and URS) and a Merit Award for the Downtown Stock-

ton Marina and Joan Darrah Promenade Design Build

Project (Kjeldsen, Sinnock & Neudeck). For a com-

plete list of the award winners, please visit our state

website at www.acec-ca.org.

Those who missed the EEA event may be interested in

knowing that exhibits of the award winners are cur-

rently on display in the hallway just outside the Gover-

nor’s Office through February 12. The Engineering

Excellence Awards recognize Engineering and Land

Surveying achievements that not only benefit our local

community but our entire state. Select winners may

also be entered by ACEC California for the ACEC Na-

tional competition. Congratulations to all who partici-

pated in this year’s event.

Engineering Excellence Award Winners Submitted by: Eddie Kho, ACEC—CA Secretary/Treasurer

ACEC-CA Legislative Advocate

Mark Smith points to EEA exhibits

on display at the State Capital

Debbie LoCicero

Recording Secretary

916-203-2474

[email protected]

Lisa Thut, CPSM

Newsletter Editor

916.773.2600, x114

[email protected]


Officers

Bob LoRusso, President (Salaber Associates, Inc.) 707.693.8800 [email protected]

Marco Palilla, Vice President (HDR Engineering, Inc) 916.817.4878 [email protected]

Ed Henderson, Secty/Treasurer (TLA Engineering & Planning) 916.786.0685 [email protected]

Directors

Steve Greenfield (Cunningham Engineering) 530.758.2026 [email protected]

Zia Islam

(Kleinfelder, Inc.) 916.366.2377 [email protected]

Jerry Jones (Nolte Associates, Inc.) 916.641.9100 [email protected]

Eli Aramouni (Drake Haglan & Associates) 916.363.4210 [email protected]

Kelly Birkes

(Rick Engineering ) 916) 638-8200 [email protected]

Greg Bardini

(Morton & Pitalo) 916.927.2400 [email protected]

State Directors

Christopher Curtis (2012) (CBC Surveys) 916.921.9033 [email protected]

Paul Enneking (2010) (Psomas) 916.788.8122 [email protected]

Bob LoRusso (2013) (Salaber Associates, Inc.) 707.693.8800 [email protected]

Jeff Patton (2011)

(Blackburn Consulting) 530.887.1494 [email protected]

2009/10 Board of Directors

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