Editor’s Notebook

September/October 2009

The Feds Have It

Military and federal stimulus projects are nearly the only work keeping many contractors going

By Mark Shaw, Editor-in-chief

With most private- sector projects on hold or canceled outright, contractors increasingly have been looking for work in the public sector. Many are still waiting for the stimulus dollars that were supposed to jump-start the industry and economy and begin to correct the country’s staggering infrastructure problems.

The stimulus update in this issue of Constructor reports that the only fast distribution of stimulus funds has been to smaller transportation-maintenance projects, while most building jobs are still in the planning or design stages.

“If they were designing projects, they were not shovel-ready,” says J. Doug Pruitt, 2009 AGC of America president, about the slow progress of the feds on vertical work.

AGC CEO Steve Sandherr reminds AGC members not to have “unsustainably high expectations” about the benefits of the stimulus. “The stimulus will keep our industry alive, but it will not turn around a $1-trillion construction industry overnight,” he says.

Stimulus funds, while slow in coming to the building arena, are deepening the federal government’s pockets for other infrastructure work. But management of those projects will require federal agencies to push the envelope of efficiency and move away from old ways of business.

To that end, Constructor writer Angelle Bergeron looks at the increasing pace of change within the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and how contractors who do federal work are trying to adapt to those changes. Bergeron’s story details how the Corps has learned to balance innovation and risk in adopting new project-delivery methods such as Early Contractor Involvement—the Corps’ variation of construction manager-at-risk.

The pressure for changes at the Corps came in part from the need for faster delivery of work after Hurricane Katrina and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We knew the normal Corps process was going to take too much time,” says Daniel Hitchings, former director of the Corps’ Task Force Hope. He stresses that innovation and new technologies must be balanced with risk and cost controls. Contractors need to communicate with the Corps and keep up with the changes at hand.

Our focus section on equipment offers tips and new technologies for contractors to help avoid the growing problem of jobsite theft and several new ways for them to monitor, maintain, track and even recover their equipment if it is stolen.