Ever spot a street or utility project while driving around that you wanted to know more about? Well, your thirst for information is about to be slaked by the city of Tacoma and its new website called City Projects.

You can type in an address to find details about work going on at that location, or you can click on highlighted areas of a map for the same information. Projects can be searched by address, business district, City Council district or neighborhood district.

“This new tool offers an easy way for people to find out details about a project, how long it will be under construction and what other projects are scheduled to happen in the near future,” said City Councilmember Ryan Mello in a statement.
Check it out at http://www.cityoftacoma.org/cityprojects.

First we got some cool award-winning concrete projects from WACA to check out, now we’ve got the region’s top wall and ceiling projects.
The DJC is publishing a special section covering the Northwest Wall & Ceiling Bureau awards. It profiles 14 projects in Washington, Oregon and British Columbia, including the Swedish Issaquah campus, which was recently voted the top project of 2011 by DJC readers, and the Consolidated Rental Car Facility at Sea-Tac Airport, which also won a concrete award and was the subject of another DJC special section last month.
One of my favorites was the Rental Car Facility’s ceiling, pictured above, which curves in three directions.

Concrete projects were once again in the spotlight, as the Washington Concrete & Aggregates Association held its annual awards banquet Wednesday night in Seattle.

This year there were 13 projects recognized, with the Vancouver Community Library taking the Grand Award. Indicative of past top winners, the library used concrete as both a structural and design element. It has post-tensioned slabs supported by columns and two core walls at each end of the building. From the street, concrete columns are on display behind the building’s glass facade.

As one of the judges for the awards, it was easy for me to single out the library as the top project. But, there was one set of project photos that impressed the heck out of me — the before and after shots of 139th Street East in Pierce County. As you can see above, the use of pervious concrete to replace the old asphalt street made a huge difference for homeowners, who sometimes were forced out of their homes for weeks when the street flooded.

Check out our Building with Concrete special section by clicking here.

Two members of Washington State’s congressional delegation — Reps. Doc Hastings and Jaime Herrera Beutler — have been appointed to the conference committee charged with hammering out a consensus highway bill.

For what seems like forever, Congress has been unable (well, unwilling) to pass an updated and long-term extension of the Surfact Transportation Act, relying instead on a series of short term extensions of current law.  These short term extensions create a long litany of negative impacts on state DOTs as well as the construction industry: no long-term planning by DOTs, reduced bid lettings, extreme competition at bidding table resulting in unrealistically low prices, work force reductions, reduced worker training, workers leaving the industry and deferred investments in new equipment.

Passage of something in both the House and the Senate and the naming of the conference committee to hammer out the differences is a big step.  But by no means is success assured, as there are MAJOR differences between the House and Senate versions.  For example, the House extension is for 90 days while the Senate’s is for two years; the House bill is mostly a mere extension of current law with some evironmental permit streamlining while the Senate’s is a comprehensive two-year package;  the House bill approves the Keystone pipeline while the Senate’s does not.

As the two conferees from this state, Reps. Hastings and Herrera Beutler would surely like to hear from local contractors and others impacted by the highway bill.  You can reach them at:

Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler: http://herrerabeutler.house.gov/Contact/

Rep. Doc Hastings: http://hastings.house.gov/Contact/

The National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) rule on representation case procedures went into effect April 30, 2012. The NLRB rule, also known as the “quickie election” or “ambush election” rule, would expedite the union representation election cycle to as little as 14 days. It is bad for both employers and employees.

While the rule doesn’t require any immediate action by employers nor will the rule effect any cases filed prior to today, employers should still continue to develop internal procedures in the chance of an organizing campaign. The outcome of the rule will require swifter action by employers to educate employees during an organizing campaign.

AGC of America opposed the rule since its consideration because it effectively limits workers’ access to information and an adequate opportunity to consider information, about whether they want to be represented by the union seeking to represent them. The rule will have a particularly difficult application and detrimental impact on the construction industry due to the complexity of identifying the appropriate bargaining unit and of determining voter eligibility in the industry, and due to the decentralized nature of construction workplaces operated by the same employer.

AGC of America is a member of the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace (CDW) which has filed a lawsuit against the rule. The court is expected to issue a decision on the merits by May 15.

A congressional resolution that would have nullified the rule was defeated last week.

For more background on the rule and AGC’s concerns, click here. For more information on the rule from the NLRB, click here.

In the continually changing saga of the National Labor Relations Board’s new regulation to require most private-sector employers to post certain notices informing employees of their rights under the National Labor Relations Board, the latest development is that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia granted an injunction pending appeal of a legal challenge to the rule brought by the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace and co-plaintiffs. With oral argument on the merits of the appeal not set until September, this effectively means that the Board may not enforce the April 30 effective date of the rule. The regulation will not go into effect – and employers need not post the poster – until fall at the very earliest, if at all. The rule could become permanently invalidated by the court or rescinded by the Board.

For further clarification, this latest development should not be confused with a decision by a U.S. District Court in South Carolina issued last Friday. That court ruled that the Board’s regulation was invalid, but its decision reached only statewide. Today’s decision relates to an appeal in a separate challenge to the rule brought in a different district, where the district court in DC ruled earlier that the posting mandate portion of the regulation is valid but the penalty provisions are not. The present decision enjoining implementation of the regulation applies nationwide.

These cases and the Board’s regulation also should not be confused with a similar but separate regulation by the Department of Labor requiring federal contractors to post a similar notice of employee rights. That rule remains in effect.

Turner Construction is finishing up a massive $419 million project at Sea-Tac Airport that will consolidate the rental car operations from the airport's parking garage and other locations to a new facility. To mark the completion of the project, the DJC has put together a special section containing articles from project participants. Check it out here.

A recently released report from FMI shows the Nonresidential Construction Index up 7.8 points to 58.1. (50 is neutral.) More companies plan to hire, albeit only up to 5%, than lay off. This is up five percentage points from last year this same time. The prediction for construction put in place is a meager .5 to 2.5%, but at least it’s more not less. The FMI report goes on, “For some indication of what is holding these expectations back, we also asked panelists for their observations on what owners are doing to control project costs. It is clear that low, low price and high competition are still the driving factors. Savvy owners are also focusing on involving CMs and contractors in the pre-construction phase of the project as well as taking advantage of more sophisticated construction delivery methods and technologies like building information modeling (BIM). It is good to see there are signs that at least pockets of the country are beginning to build again, but the economy is still at the mercy of an uncertain global economy and a world that seems to be changing rapidly in many directions.”

Don’t forget to read the DJC’s annual Construction & Equipment special. This year, Joel Andersen wrote about how his family’s construction firm built itself a new office in Seattle from 95 percent recycled, reused or re-purposed materials. Cool stuff!

We also have a brief chat with five local contractors to get a feel of what’s going on in the industry. Of course, we can’t forget award-winning  projects by members of the Associated Builders and Contractors of Western Washington.

Check it out!

The Washington State Department of Enterprise Services announced that beginning March 30, contractors from states that have an in-state bidder preference competing on public works projects in Washington will have a reciprocal amount added to their bid proposals.

The reciprocal amount will be added to bring them in line with the disadvantages contractors based in Washington face when bidding on projects in Alaska, Nevada, New Mexico and Wyoming. The 2011 Legislature directed Enterprise Services (then General Administration) to take this action.

Currently, those four states provide a bidding preference to resident contractors who bid on public works contracts. Alaska, Nevada, New Mexico and Wyoming add a set percentage disadvantage amount to the bids submitted from out-of-state contractors. This puts Washington-based contractors at a disadvantage when bidding in those states. Starting March 30 DES will add a reciprocal disadvantage to all public works bids submitted by contractors from states with an in-state bidding preference. The disadvantage amount will be equal to the advantage given by the state with the bidding preference.

More info: http://www.ga.wa.gov/eas/BidPrefAnnouncement.pdf