Union dominance of state-funded public works faces its most serious challenge in decades, with Republican governors and lawmakers campaigning to topple or pare long-standing prevailing wage laws.The Midwest is a particular hot spot, as it has been in the past, but the wage contests are playing out from Nevada to New York, where Democrats also are divided.In New York City, a program that provides financial benefits to affordable housing is the heart of an apparent disagreement between Mayor Bill DeBlasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo, both Democrats. DeBlasio wants to exempt such housing from prevailing wages while Cuomo seems not to.In
Since California has always been a magnet for immigrants, it shouldn't have surprised me that, over the years, so many of my closest relations—my sister, parents, ex-wife and son—migrated there from New York City, our home turf.
Related Links: Edmonton Bridge Contractors Straighten Buckled Girders Until March 16, everything was coming together very nicely on the new bridge at 102nd Avenue over Groat Road in Edmonton, Alberta. Two days earlier, the crew from fabricator and erector Supreme Steel had placed and bolted the first of seven central girder sections that would complete the span. Winds interrupted work for awhile, but by Sunday night crews resumed girder placement until six sections were up. Then, at about 2:15 a.m. on Monday, March 16, four of the girders buckled laterally, three deflecting several feet and leaving interior braces bent or
Dodge Data & Analytics The owner informs the design team of a budget contingency about half the time. Related Links: Managing Uncertainty and Expectations in Building Design and Construction I hate secrets, but the owners of building construction projects apparently believe in them.Deep within one of my company's most important recent publications, a SmartMarket Report on uncertainty in building construction, is a fascinating series of findings about whether owners establish contingencies in case their project costs run over budget.Owners, it turns out, often keep the information secret from other members of the project team."Which may explain," say the authors at
opencompute.org This image on OpenCompute.org may show part of a data-center plan that is part of a lawsuit against Facebook. Related Links: Facebook Announcement on New Data Center Bladeroom Website Facebook blog post An engineering firm that provides data centers has filed a lawsuit against Facebook that accuses the social-media giant of stealing a design and installation method for efficient data centers as well as making those ideas publicly available.Facebook opened a new data center, the second of two, last year in Lulea, Sweden. The lawsuit implies that Facebook used the company's design and system for that new data center
A Federal judge in Atlanta has sentenced one of the partners in the multistate crime spree involving forged Chubb surety bonds to four years, nine months of prison.
The new president of the Associated General Contractors, Chuck Greco, was talking about safety with a reporter at the Puerto Rico Convention Center in San Juan, where AGC held its annual convention on March 17-20. There, Greco described what has happened when he had to dismiss a worker for repeated unsafe actions."Their wives would call me and say, 'Please give him another chance.' And I'd say, 'If I do that, I'm hurting you, because I've done everything I can to impress him that, if he gets hurt out here, you're the person who is going to suffer.' "GRECOGreco, 59, is
Photo by Jeffrey Cox / ENR T.B. Penick says in a lawsuit that it expected sub default insurance to pay fast. Related Links: Subcontractor Default Insurance Powerpoint Memorial Day weekend, 2013, was a triumph for New York City as it reopened its ravaged beaches seven months after Superstorm Sandy. To do so, New York City had three months earlier hired Triton Structural Concrete, a part of contractor T.B. Penick & Sons, to build and install most of 35 lifeguard and bathroom station modules at city beaches for $105 million.The project is one of ENR's Best of the Best projects, but
Investigators from the New York state attorney general's office on Feb. 18 carted off boxes of documents from the Uniondale, N.Y., office of GEB HiRise, an engineering practice that had been employed by an insurer to inspect homes damaged by Superstorm Sandy in 2012.
Photo courtesy of Kiewit-Turner JV Patient Critical Colorado veteran's hospital was the VA's first try at new project delivery system. Related Links: Federal Ruling Halts Work on Massive Colorado VA Hospital (subscription required) Searching for Better Ways to Build Big VA Hospitals I t remains a mystery what role the design team played and how much, if any, blame the Dept. of Veterans Affairs will shoulder regarding the problems that have beset the VA hospital project in Aurora, Colo. Since a federal contracts dispute-review board last month granted project prime contractor Kiewit-Turner the right to leave the job, K-T and
