Mary E. Lee likes quick thinkers. And she needs one to keep the trust of voters who last year approved a $1.2-billion bond measure to expand facilities for the 120,000-student Los Angeles Community College District, one of the nation's largest. Lee, the district's executive director of planning and development, is among a growing array of public and private owners whose larger construction missions and tighter schedules are pushing them toward outside "program managers" to deliver the goods.
"The most important person whom I was looking for was the program director," says Lee, in interviewing E&C firm candidates crowding into the program management marketplace. "I wanted a person who could think fast and keep a lot of things together." Precluded by a 2000 California ballot initiative from spending bond funds for in-house capital program management, Lee, like other state school officials, had to seek outside expertise.