PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE
Well spring is finally in the air. We kicked the new season off last month with an excellent presentation on Boston’s Central Artery project put on by Dan Wood, P.E. from FHWA. It was very nice to see a large turnout for Dan – hopefully this will be a trend for our future dinner meetings. This last meeting was also our unofficial “student night” where we invite graduating engineers to visit and meet our membership to discuss career opportunities. As this apparently overlapped with official spring break for most colleges, the resulting participation was somewhat less than hoped. Maybe we should have held the meeting in Fort Lauderdale ?
On a more serious side and of importance to us all is the proposed cut in federal spending for state and local highway improvements. If approved, we could see a reduction of more than $8.6 billion in next year’s program. Furthermore, this reduction could set a negative trend for the impending reauthorization at the federal level which could also drastically reduce spending beyond just next year. I urge all of you to give support to our congressmen by letting them know that a downturn of this magnitude is simply not acceptable for our collective industries.
Next Meeting. Our next dinner meeting will be at the Arches on Monday, April 29. PENNDOT’s Chief Engineer, Gary Hoffman, P.E., will be speaking on Management of Transportation Assets including Pennsylvania’s perspective on infrastructure security in the wake of the recent terrorist attacks on our nation and the current outlook for the bridge program in PENNDOT. As always, you need to contact Bill Sinclair at Michael Baker for reservations. Hopefully, we will be able to secure the entire room at the Arches so we can spread out a little. Please note that Michael Baker has relocated their office, so Bill’s contact information is revised as follows:
Bill Sinclair
Association for Bridge Construction and Design
c/o Michael Baker Jr., Inc.
4431 North Front St., 2nd Floor
Harrisburg, PA 17110-1709
717-221-2035 (ph)
717-234-7611 (fax)
CHAPTER NOTES:
Membership. Our current count of members in good standing is at its highest level ever ! Bill Sinclair and Mike Britt our working hard at getting membership cards and certificates out to everyone. To date, we have 78 individual memberships and 29 sustaining memberships.
Web Site. We are continuing to develop and update our web site. The bulk of this responsibility has been laid upon our Webmaster, Joe Pegnetter – but he should not have to do this alone. If anyone has web programming expertise and would like to volunteer to assist Joe, please contact John Buchheit (jbuchheit@gfnet.com) or any of our other board members. Our intent is to get the site to a level where it can function as a primary information medium for the chapter containing membership data, calendar of events, chapter news, etc. To do this, we really need to get some additional resources to help. The site is located at www.abcd-susquehanna.org.
Events. The dinner meetings are winding down for awhile, but Steve Bussanmas (sbussanmas@high.net) is still considering some possibilities for at least one group event for summer or fall. Current suggestions include a Senator’s game, participation in the upcoming celebration for the Rockville Bridge, a bike tour of Lancaster’s covered bridges, and an ABCD golf outing. Please let Steve know your thoughts regarding favorability of any of these. We plan to have some open discussion at our next meeting regarding this issue, so bring your ideas and don’t be afraid to speak up !
Future Dinner Meetings. Tentatively, we have September 16th
and October 28th scheduled for our next respective dinner meetings after our
upcoming one in
· Larry King (PENNDOT Center for Program Development and Management)
· Scott Christie (PENNDOT Chief Bridge Engineer)
· Update on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge Project
· Update on the PA Turnpike Susquehanna River Bridge Project
· Frank Kempf (PA Turnpike)
Recommendations or suggestions for speakers or topics are always welcome, so don’t hesitate to contact any of our board members with your ideas.
In closing, a personal thanks. As I leave office as President, I want to thank the bridge community for so enthusiastically supporting ABCD. When a small group of us got together to try to resurrect the Chapter, we weren’t sure that there was real interest for it. I’m happy to report that our doubts have been proven wrong. The record membership roles and great turnouts at our dinner meetings tells us that this is a worthwhile effort to satisfy a real need. Our speakers have addressed a wide topics that are of special interest to us in the bridge community, but not readily available in other organizations. For me, the sidebar conversations with fellow professionals have been most beneficial and fun. I intend to stay active in ABCD and urge you to do the same. Volunteer for a committee or the Board. It’s not too much work and ABCD will be stronger with more involved members. I want to thank past and present Board members for their enthusiasm and help in restarting ABCD here. Finally, a special thanks to Bill Sinclair our Secretary who has been a driving force in our reorganization. See you at the meeting. Hal Rogers