Rocky economic times, green infrastructure, lean construction and helping the industry be heard were themes at the Associated General Contractors of America convention in Orlando on March 17-20.

AGC has to be about “the industry, not about the politics,” says AGC’s new president, Ted Aadland, CEO of Aadland Evans Construction Inc., Portland, Ore. “We can’t afford to be a partisan organization. We need to work with elected officials in both parties on the issues.” Aadland said AGC is like “the sleeping giant”–members can “wake up” to influence those who make codes and regulations and reach out to other construction associations to “help the industry speak as one resounding voice.”

Collaborative activities like a coalition with the manufacturing and energy sectors were among the highlights called out by J. Doug Pruitt, chairman and CEO of Sundt Construction, Phoenix, as he looked back at his past year as AGC president. On March 17, AGC signed a partnership agreement with the Manufacturing Institute, an affiliate of the National Association of Manufacturers, to advocate for alternative pathways to graduation for the nation’s at-risk youth among other efforts. “We have to be loud and vocal,” Pruitt said.

The next generation of employees will expect companies to have environmentally friendly practices, said Jan Berman, president of MechoShade Systems Inc., New York City. In one of several panels addressing green issues, he noted that just as the Americans With Disabilities Act transformed from being an added factor to being integral in design and construction, so will Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards.

Scott Snelling, a bridge engineer with New York City-based Hardesty and Hanover, noted national efforts under way to create LEED-like rating systems for bridges and roads. Dominique Lueckenhoff, head of the Water Protection Division/Office of Watersheds for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 3, told attendees that the global market for environmental products and services is projected to double from $1.37 billion a year to $2.74 billion by 2020.

In the current economic climate, the conference included workshops on how contractors can avoid work stoppage and payment delays with owners and pursue strategies for recovering money if an owner defaults on a project. Because lien laws vary by state, contractors should adopt problem-avoidance strategies in drafting contracts and managing risk, said Holland & Knight’s Stephen Shapiro. Those include careful preparation of payment applications, insisting on proof of owner financing and enforcing contract provisions.

The scramble for work can lead contractors to let their guard down, but they need to be even more vigilant now to assure they will be paid for their work, says Robert Burns, an attorney and partner with Stinson Morrison Hecker LLP, Wichita, Kan.

The convention, which drew 2,400 attendees, included the second session of AGC’s newly formed Lean Construction Forum. Chairman Chuck Greco, CEO of Houston-based Linbeck Group, said the multidisciplinary forum is working on a curriculum for teaching lean construction techniques that involves 92 hours of instruction and bronze, silver and gold levels of certification. The forum’s next session will be at the AGC Building Division meeting on June 9-12 in Midway, Utah.

The project will rebuild the Congress Parkway interchange, which connects Interstate 290 to the north-south leg of Chicago’s Wacker Drive, the double-decker downtown artery made famous in the movie “The Blues Brothers.”

After opening the initial round of bids from three prominent Chicago contractors on Feb. 11, the city disqualified two, then rejected the third for being too expensive. The lowest bid, at $73 million, came from a joint venture of F.H Paschen and Cabo Construction Corp. That bid was rejected because the company submitted a bid deposit of $50,000 instead of the required 5%, or $3.6 million. The city engineer’s estimate was about $100 million.

The next-lowest bid, $78 million, was submitted by James McHugh Construction Co. The bid was rejected, says Shannon Andrews, spokeswoman for Chicago’s Dept. of Procurement Services, because McHugh didn’t sign a required affirmative-action compliance plan.

The remaining bid, $85 million, came via Walsh Construction Co. The city rejected all three. Walsh subsequently filed a lawsuit claiming it should have been declared the winner, but the city’s rejection of all three bids eliminated the basis for the legal action. The contractors have either not returned ENR’s phone calls or declined to comment.

On April 3, the city will open new bids and expects to award the project shortly thereafter. Work on the two-year reconstruction is expected to begin sometime in June. Rebuilding the interchange will reconfigure ramps to make traffic flow more smoothly and safely. It will also create 3 acres of new green space.

Wacker Drive is a two-level viaduct whose upper level provides six lanes of normal traffic at street level. Its lower level offers express travel for through traffic and access to area buildings for delivery vehicles. Intermittent, center-lane ramps connect the upper and lower levels. About 60,000 vehicles use the drive daily. It is home to a number of Chicago landmarks, including the Willis (formerly Sears) Tower.

Reconstructing the Congress interchange is one of three major projects that together will completely rebuild 1.2 mi of Wacker Drive’s 55-year-old, north-south leg. Its east-west leg was rebuilt in 2002 at a cost of about $200 million. The north-south rebuild is funded for $366 million.

The other two phases will rebuild both levels of the road, add more than a foot of overhead clearance to the lower level, separate the lower level’s through-traffic lanes from the delivery lanes, improve utilities throughout the corridor and replace many of the center ramps with landscaped medians at street level.

T.Y. Lin International designed the new interchange. Alfred Benesch & Co. is designing the first section of Wacker Drive that will be reconstructed. A designer for the second half of the new Wacker Drive has not yet been named.

Chicago Dept. of Transportation says it expects to bid out relocation of underground utilities in April or May of this year, with the work lasting until the end of the year. Bids to reconstruct the northern half of the Wacker Drive project will be solicited this September or October, says Andrews, with work starting in January 2011 and continuing for a year.

No bid date has been set for the contract to reconstruct the southern half of the Wacker Drive project, but the work is expected to run through all of 2012.

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas, claims that a three-year-old student recreation facility at its main campus fails to meet some seismic requirements under the 2002 Uniform Building Code. The structure remains open, but a warning notice is posted.

Designed by the Phoenix office of DMJM Design, a unit of AECOM, with St. Louis-based Hastings+Chivetta Architects Inc., the building is likely to end up in court. Bennett & Jimenez Inc., Las Vegas, which has since shut down, was the structural engineer. Phoenix-based Kitchell Contractors was the construction manager at-risk under a $43.9-million guaranteed-maximum-price contract.

The 70-ft-tall, steel-moment framed structure has an aluminum-framed glass curtain wall, 10-ft roof cantilever overhangs, 100-ft clear spans and bow-tie roof trusses. It’s sheathed in a combination of block, glass, precast and metal panels.

Roof leaks and cracked and buckling floor tiles have also been a problem. The university has since solicited request-for-proposals for building design and repair costs, which will be included as part of the seismic repair’s scope of work.

On Feb. 8, Kitchell and UNLV signed a binding arbitration agreement over cost overruns related to re-manufacturing new structural steel, among other things. Kitchell had sought $9 million; it got $2.7 million.

In 2008, the university hired structural engineer Filip C. Filippou, and he produced a report. “Because of the choice of a flexible structural system for resisting lateral forces, the displacements are relatively large,” says Filippou. He blames the “incompatibility” between the flexible and rigid structural components for the problem.

“We feel…we were the victim of severe professional malpractice” by the design team, says Richard Linstrom, vice president and counsel for UNLV.

AECOM says it’s trying to solve the problem. “We have on multiple occasions offered our assistance to UNLV in resolving the issues they have faced on this project, and we remain willing to assist,” says AECOM’s spokesman in an e-mail statement. “However, we do not agree with all of UNLV’s assertions.”

Traffic moved across the Bridge of Lions on March 17 for the first time in four years following the lengthy restoration of the historic landmark in St. Augustine, Fla. A key part of the work required the rehab team to remove the bridge’s signature arched girders and, after sandblasting, return them as non-load-bearing elements.

In 2004, the Florida Dept. of Transportation awarded a rehabilitation contract to Tidewater Skanska Inc., Virginia Beach, Va., for a $76.8-million project to restore the bridge built in 1927.

While the scope of the work included updating the bridge for future generations, the project also tried to maintain the integrity of the national landmark named after the lion statues flanking the western approach. It carries State Route A1A over the Matanzas River, linking downtown to Anastasia Island.

“The two elements that were really sort of sacred were to keep the bascule towers and the girders as original elements,” says Craig Teal, FDOT project manager. “They could be painted over and that type of thing, but they really couldn’t be altered in any way.”

The project called for a $9.4-million, 1,600-ft-long temporary concrete bridge to be built on 120 driven 24-in. piles, with an 80-ft vertical lift span to serve the navigation channel. Once traffic could move over the temporary bridge, the rehabilitation of the original 1,575-ft-long, two-lane bridge began, which included work on the 79-ft-long bascule span and the 24-ft-tall octagonal bascule towers with barrel-tile roofs.

Now the only remaining work other than aesthetic details is dismantling the temporary bridge.

“It was almost like four projects: build one, dismantle one, rebuild it and dismantle the other,” says Thomas J. Fulton, Tidewater project manager.

Both bridgeworks were designed by Reynolds, Smith and Hills Inc., Jacksonville. The navigation spans were designed by Lichtenstein Consulting Engineers, Paramus, N.J. The design called for new approach foundations. Because the bridge gained a couple of feet in width in the rehab, the new foundations were built outside the existing foundations.

Previously, the bridge had a 15-ton limit due to the deterioration and dated nature of the structure. The city’s largest fire truck weighs more than that, so moving traffic across the bridge had been a challenge.

The arched steel-plate fascia girders were deemed an integral element in preserving the bridge, but their condition could not be determined until after the bridge had been disassembled, which required the fabrication of special bargemounted steel frames to hold 17 pairs of 100-ft-long riveted arched girders at their bearing points. Due to the traffic patterns in the area, the girders had to be shipped out late at night to Florida Structural Steel in Lakeland, Fla., where they were sandblasted.

Careful Inventory

Keeping track of the girders proved to be a challenge. “The plans we had from 1927 were not very detailed, obviously, so we had to essentially do an inventory of those girders, what the actual section was, and evaluate where we needed to strengthen them,” says Jack Haynes, Reynolds, Smith’s project manager.

Designers created a new steel framework to carry the bridge deck, which had been completely supported by the girders. “They took the load off those girders and turned them into ornamental girders and put in an entirely new structural-steel skeleton inside them to carry the load of the bridge deck,” Fulton said.

The city of St. Augustine seems more complete now that the work is done. “That bridge defines St. Augustine,” Haynes says. “I grew up in Jacksonville, and the debate on whether to replace it or rehabilitate it has been going on my entire life. And I think they did the right thing in rehabilitating it. I think when those lions return and the construction you see out there today goes away, it’s a historic project at a historic location. That bridge is on every postcard you see of the city.”

If another Hurricane Katrina-like disaster hits New Orleans, the city’s water and sewer board will now have a hazard-mitigation plan to ensure that local environmental infrastructure can get state and federal emergency repair funds.

“Probably a lot of other cities don’t have this because they haven’t had the disaster,” says Gordon Austin, chief of environmental affairs for the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board. “This is a formality to make sure you’re eligible for [Federal Emergency Management Agency] mitigation funds.”

The board still is trying to obtain FEMA funding to mitigate an estimated $98 million in damage from Katrina, which struck in 2005. According to Austin, San Francisco waited a decade after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake for FEMA reimbursement, and Florida waited at least 15 years for funds after Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

Because the New Orleans board did not have its own hazard-mitigation plan, one that classifies it as a single local jurisdiction, the infrastructure provider had to compete for funding with fire and police departments and other city agencies.

By developing a plan that complies with rules for receiving hazard-mitigation funding, the board’s jurisdiction is recognized, and it can apply directly for FEMA grant programs and reimbursements, says Tom Miller, a board staff member.

Austin adds that having FEMA pre-approve specific mitigations speeds up the process. “It makes sure you are aware of potential hazards and that you are actually identifying need,” he points out. Prior to Katrina, because the board had not failed to provide service in more than 100 years, it had underestimated risks of events such as Katrina, Austin concedes.

Lambert Engineers, New Orleans, which developed the board mitigation plan under a $43,200 contract, vetted it at hearings. The board anticipates state and FEMA approval by April 11. The final version will be at www.swbno.org. Federal rules require updates every five years.

A dam on the Green River in western Washington state remains one of the nation’s most unsafe, despite $15 million of work that has been completed over the past year. But the Army Corps of Engineers told local officials on March 18 that an additional $44 million in upgrades is needed to lower the structure’s failure risk to acceptable levels.

“We can manage the risk at the dam, but doing so puts those downriver at risk. That’s what makes this dam unique,” says Mamie Brouwer, program manager for the Howard A. Hanson Dam.

The dam was opened in 1962 to ease flooding in the Green River valley. But it is one of a handful in the U.S. that are classified at the highest risk because of the potential loss of life combined with the economic consequences should the dam fail. The Hanson dam is one of 12 Corps dam projects the agency has classified “urgent and compelling and unsafe.”

In January 2009, after heavy rains and a high-water event in the reservoir, officials in the Corps’ Seattle District noticed seepage and depressions in an abutment of the earthen-engineered dam. The Corps immediately lowered the reservoir and initiated improvements to shore up the abutment, which is the result of a 10,000-year-old landslide.

With money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Corps granted a $13-million contract to Nicholson Construction, Cuddy, Pa., to install a 450-ft-long grout wall, consisting of two 10-ft-thick walls. An additional $1-million contract was awarded to Jensen Drilling, Eugene, Ore., to improve a drainage tunnel in the abutment.

The dam is critical to industry downstream on the Green River. Since the earthen dam was built, local residents have become accustomed to living and operating in the floodplain without risk, says Dana Hinman, a spokeswoman for the city of Auburn, Wash. The area, near Tacoma and southwest of Seattle, has grown into one of the nation’s largest warehouse and goods distribution centers, with an estimated $4-billion value.

Even with the fixes finished last month, the area faces the risk of flooding of up to 10 feet in a one-in-25-year storm event. The planned $44-million project would provide protection for up to a one-in-140-year storm event by extending the grout wall 650 ft to the east and deepening the entire 1,100-ft wall another 200 ft. It is now from 90 ft to 170 ft deep. A Corps official says the agency’s report and recommended solutions will be presented to Congress by June. If funding for the additional work is approved, the job will be let for competitive bid. A permanent fix, likely to include a concrete cutoff wall and possibly costing up to $500 million, is now being studied.

Firms looking to boost sagging bottom lines and gain more-robust public-sector construction markets generated a record attendance of more than 550 at this year’s federal and military workload briefings, sponsored by the Society of American Military Engineers on March 18 in Alexandria, Va. Traditional pockets of “milcon” work–such as in base closure and housing–are winding down, officials said. But overseas expansion and new initiatives in energy conservation and facility “quality of life” upgrades are boosting work for the short term, just as new conference attendees were boosting their profiles.

The SAME event preceded by one day testimony from Defense Undersecretary Robert F. Hale, who noted DOD’s $18.7-billion milcon request for fiscal 2011. He said it was down 20% from the previous year, due to $5.2 billion less requested for base realignment and closure, a program set to end in fiscal 2011. But excluding that, he said, the request is up 8.4%. “We’re in a growth industry inside the gates, even though there is a recession outside,” said Brig. Gen. Al T. Aycock, deputy commander of the Army Installation Management Command.

The Army has 700 projects worth $15.7 billion to execute this fiscal year, said Robert Slockbower, military programs director for the Corps of Engineers. Robert Silver, Naval Facilities Engineering Command director of military construction, noted that its FY11 milcon budget of $3.9 billion is “a historic high.” But he noted that recent “robust” budgets will level off. “We’re running on the red line now, but this will trail off to more normal levels,” Silver said.

For now, however, the Navy is gearing up a multibillion-dollar building program on the island of Guam to accommodate the planned transfer of thousands of Marines and others from Okinawa, as a result of a treaty with Japan. But its speed and breadth may depend on how the administration responds to concern over the buildup’s impact on the island’s fragile environment and strained infrastructure. The Navy spent $50 million to study the impacts, but negative reaction to its conclusions from U.S. environmental regulators and others may require White House mediation. President Obama was set to visit Guam on an Asian trip cancelled by last week’s passage of health-care reform.

Military officials cited statistics of expedited procurement and the hiring or rehiring of thousands of contract specialists. They also said the services would continue to embrace design standardization, adding that more joint basing would improve the processes. But executives say there are still major discrepancies in project delivery approaches among the services and that strategies such as “adapt-build” are not uniformly favored by base commanders. Please click here for link to briefing slides presented.

While President Obama signed the health-care reform legislation into law at a jubilant White House ceremony on March 23, grim-faced Republicans geared up for a battle in the Senate over a “reconciliation” package that amends the bill just signed into law. Riding with that reconciliation measure is the fate of a provision that has divided the construction industry.

That provision, sponsored by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), was in the Senate-passed version of the bill and thus is now law. It requires construction companies with more than five full-time employees and a payroll of $250,000 or more to offer health-care coverage to their workers or pay a penalty of $750 per employee. The threshold for other industries is 50 full-time workers.

The reconciliation package pending in the Senate would delete the provision, and some construction groups have been blasting the Merkley language and want to see it go. These organizations say the provision singles out the industry that has been hit the hardest by unemployment. “It’s a slap in the face to construction employers,” says Eben Wyman, the National Utility Contractors Association’s vice president for government relations.

Organized labor lobbied hard for the provision and wants it to stay. Jacob Hay, a spokesman for the Laborers International Union of North America, says, “We believe that the health-care legislation has some positive reforms, but to fully impact and benefit construction workers, it needs to include Senator Merkley’s provision…because 65% of construction businesses employ less than five people.”

Republicans planned to raise “points of order” with the Senate Parliamentarian to remove portions of the revisions package that do not relate to budgetary issues. Stanley Kolbe, director of government affairs for the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors’ National Association, says one item targeted by Republicans is the Merkley language.

If the Senate makes changes in the reconciliation measure, it would have to go to the House for another vote.

Republicans want to go even further. They are vowing to try to repeal the newly enacted health-care measure in its entirety. GOP lawmakers also are pledging vociferously to make health care a central issue in the November elections.

The landmark legislation will provide health coverage to an additional 32 million Americans and cut the deficit…

A 70-story, folded, creased and curved stainless-steel curtain wall on an 867-ft-tall apartment building has been called “Gehry only on the outside,” as if the building is a fake Frank. It’s true that, when it opens next year, New York City’s tallest residential tower won’t be an internationally acclaimed cultural icon, as is the architect’s now-12-year-old Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain. The 76-story high-rise is not as colorful, whimsical and structurally innovative as the nearly decade-old Experience Music Project rock ‘n’ roll museum in Seattle. The new tower is not as description-defying inside and out as the six-year-old Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. But that building was torturous to build: There were 10,000-plus requests for information (RFIs), and it was $174 million over budget and the subject of a dispute that ended in a $17.8-million settlement.

Draping Lower Manhattan’s Beekman Tower, Frank Gehry’s creases may only be skin-deep, but the depth of the building team’s accomplishment–producing a budget-driven, speculative apartment tower with the signature of the “king of swoopy” all over it–is not superficial.

The job, topped out and clad to the 51st floor, is under budget and on schedule, discounting a three-month work hiatus related to the Great Recession, says the local developer, Forest City Ratner Cos. FCRC says there are no claims to date and only 100-plus RFIs on the entire job, including the seven-faced, 319,000- sq-ft drape on all but the south face–hands down, the architect’s most ambitious facade ever.

This project is “Frank Gehry demystified,” says Joseph A. Rechichi, an FCRC senior vice president.

Bruce Ratner, FCRC’s chairman, had a Gehry “sculpitecture” in mind from day one. But he also wanted an economical and constructible Gehry, with minimal process pain. Initially, “we were concerned about [the curtain wall's] constructibility, and long-term use,” Rechichi says.

The facade’s success relied on several strategies. One was the development of a traditional unitized curtain-wall system for the wall’s air-and-water barrier, with an outer rain screen for the wild shapes. Unitized systems are unusual for residential towers, especially rental ones. “For the size and scale of the project,” however, it had to have a unitized system, says John Bowers, Gehry’s project manager.

Unlike a stick-built system with costly field labor, a unitized system is shop-fabricated. Workers can install finished units quickly, without expensive staging.

On Beekman Tower, a floor plate can be completely enclosed in four to five consecutive working days, says Bowers. “The greatest advantage of a unitized wall system is in the schedule,” he says.

“Our ability to divorce the wall from the balance of the building was huge,” adds FCRC’s Rechichi.

A key move on FCRC’s part was to engage the curtain-wall supplier early under a design-assist contract. Another key factor was the use of sophisticated digital tools, including building information modeling (BIM) and computer-numerically controlled (CNC) cutting tools. Automation has “enabled me to bring buildings of architectural quality to fruition,” says the Los Angeles-based Gehry.

FCRC also used veterans of Gehry’s past projects for the facade and the reinforced-concrete superstructure. Curtain- wall supplier Permasteelisa North America (PNA) worked on the Disney concert hall and Manhattan’s 10-story Interactive Corp. headquarters–Gehry’s only other unitized curtain wall. Concrete contractor Sorbara Construction Corp., Lynbrook, N.Y., built Interactive.

The 1.1-million-sq-ft Beekman is a mixed-use development with a sculptural tower–a fat “T” in plan–that will…