Another month has gone by and my term is nearing its end. It’s hard to believe that the year is almost over. I have a theory on that subject. For a five year kid a year is 1/5th (20%) of his/her lifetime and they have no memory of the first couple of years and for somebody who is 40 years old (another kid) a year is 1/40th (2.5%) of their lifetime. So the older we all get the smaller percent of our life is a year. Sorry for the squirrel moment. Back to my message, this month has been the most difficult edition to find something semi interesting to write about.
This past week I participated in my Legislative Visit Day (LVD) at the State Capitol. In discussions with fellow Chapter members, who have attended previous LVD, I learned that we don’t always meet directly with the Senate or Assembly members. More often than not you would meet with a staff member who may have the ability to communicate our message to the legislative member better than we might be able to.
Marco Palilla is the Sierra Chapter grass roots chair and has been to numerous D’s.His organization and leadership skills were very apparent to this rookie and I was paired with other members who have previous experience.
The ACEC CA staff had created a list of talking points for each of our scheduled visits. It’s amazing how much effort and preparation that Kelly and her staff have done prior to LVD. They all need a nice round of applause and a big Thank You from the membership.
As most of you may have heard and if you haven’t, you must have been climbing Mt Everest or someplace similar. Governor Brown last week signed SB1 the 10 year $52 billion dollar transportation funding bill. I’m certain that most of
our member firms will see some of this work and will benefit from the improved transportation facilities around the state with these new funding dollars. Time will tell though. There was another bill signing at the same time, SB 496, this is our “Duty to Defend” bill that ACEC CA has been working on for a number of years. Let’s have a toast to the ACEC CA staff for all of their hard work on this issue.
Our next Chapter meeting on May 17th and will be a lunch meeting at Sacramento Hilton. The featured speaker will be Jose Ramirez, Senior Civil Engineer with Sacramento Regional County Sanitation District. He will be discussing the South County AG program. This is a reclaimed water program supplying water to agricultural interests and others in the southern part of the County.
Next ACEC State event will be the annual State Conference in Incline Village, Lake Tahoe on October 8 – 11, 2017. I hope to see everybody in May at the Sierra Chapter ACEC lunch meeting.
Cheers!
