Assuming that our awesome newsletter editor (Lisa Thut, now with Blackburn Consulting) pulls it off, this will be hitting your email inbox just on the brink of the 2012 Election. Or, if you are like me, always a day or two behind on email messages (shhhh, don’t tell the boss!) the election will already be over. Hooray, the barrage of political advertisements is done!

If the election hasn’t happened yet, please make sure you vote. I am a firm believer that you have no right to complain about your representatives if you didn’t exercise your right to vote.

The good news is that even if your candidate didn’t win, or if a key proposition didn’t pass, the economy tends to pick up after an election as “certainty” returns. The policies that come forth from new federal, state, and local governing bodies may not look rosy, but a business can strategically move forward once leadership knows the rules and the players. Perhaps that is true, but on the other hand the economy typically improves due to the pending Holiday retail bump! Regardless, I’ll go out on a limb and predict that 2013 will be better economically than 2012.

Hopefully an improving economy means that we’ll be growing our engineering ranks soon. Your Sierra Chapter has stayed amazingly strong over the last four years, holding our membership at 85+ firms, one of the largest in the State. I hope that number will grow over the year as the economy in Sacramento slowly improves. But what really keeps an organization strong is growth from within, specifically from the next generation of leaders. Thus, I urge you to invite one of your up and coming leaders to our November Dinner meeting. We have planned a great program on the Folsom Dam Spillway project (see post) to entice their attendance, it will provide them an opportunity to network and us an opportunity to expose them to ACEC’s mission. And hopefully they’ll get to join us in a post-election celebration!