Welcome back everyone! Hopefully everyone had a relaxing summer and is ready for the 2022-23 term. To start things off, I want to send a huge thank you to our Past President, Scott Lillibridge, for successfully leading us through the last year and navigating our return to in-person meetings, which we plan to continue this year. I’m excited to be your chapter president and join Scott, Jerry Jones (’20-’21), and Kevin Gustorf (’19-’20) as State Directors representing the Sierra Chapter.

Joining me as chapter officers are Vice President, Erik Fanselau, and Secretary/Treasurer, Donald Blackburn. We welcome back Dana Remington as a Director. You may recall that Dana led the Chapter during the 2016-17 campaign. Dana joins fellow Director Marco Palilla as Past Presidents to provide their experience and leadership to the Board. Our remaining Directors include Rosa Griggs, Chad Coleman, JD Christiansen, and Howard Michael. We have an experienced and balanced Board of Directors with a wide range of ACEC and industry experience, representing both large and small businesses, and covering an array of disciplines and markets. We have the wonderful Debbie LoCicero keeping the board organized, coordinating our events, welcoming meeting attendees (and making sure they enter the meeting raffle), getting our newsletters and announcements out to our members, and much, much more.

In addition to a great lineup of Sierra Chapter monthly meetings, 2022-23 looks to be an eventful year for ACEC. We have elections coming up in November, which always stimulates activity at all levels of ACEC. The ACEC-CA Engineering Excellence Awards returns to an in-person event and will be combined with the annual conference in February. Also returning to the schedule in May is Legislative Visit Day, another opportunity for member firms to influence policies and legislation affecting the industry. The Sierra Chapter will continue its support of local youth STEM programs, such as CREATE and robotics programs; Mid-Pac collegiate competitions; and college scholarship programs.

Here’s to a great year! I hope to see you at our monthly meetings. Please reach out to me or any of our board members for information on how you can participate in ACEC events, fundraisers, sponsorships, committees, etc.

Cheers,

Tom