We kicked off the new year with our always popular Joint ACEC/APWA meeting on January8thwith our very first Virtual Meeting. Our guest speaker was State Assemblymember Ken Cooley who represents the people of the 8th District. Assemblymember Cooley last spoke to us in 2013 soon after first being elected to the Assembly. This was also Vin Cay’s first meeting as the Sacramento Chapter’s APWA President. Vin is with the City of West Sacramento.
As always, the turnout was good with many Sierra Chapter members in attendance. Vice President Scott Lillibridge represented the Sierra Chapter (President Jerry was tied up) and welcomed everyone to the meeting.
Assemblymember Cooley soon arrived (virtually from his home office) and jumped right into his presentation entitled ”The Road to Your Future Runs Through Someone’s Head”. He spoke about ways to communicate and collaborate with groups of people to better facilitate their buy-in on new ideas. He talked about how the advent of widespread electronic media has changed the nature of communication. He also talked about the different audiences that must be communicated with including allies, potential allies and unaligned groups and how to reach out to them all. Following his presentation, Assemblymember Cooley took questions from the audience. He spoke at length about the security issues impacting the State Capitol and how the construction of new facilities would alleviate many of those concerns.
After Assemblymember Cooley’s presentation and Q&A session, I was able to announce this years winners of the Tim Fleming Memorial Scholarship (see article in this newsletter for details) and the 2020 Stan Wilkening Member of the Year award winner: Immediate Past APWA President Darcy Taylor, with Ghirardelli Associates.
As with past Joint Lunch events with APWA, this was a great event to kick off 2021!
