Related Links: Stan Marek Says Obama's Order Will Help President Obama's executive order is an undesirable way to jump-start immigration reform, but it may help provoke Congress to make the badly needed legislative overhaul. Taking up to five million undocumented immigrants out of the shadows would accomplish a lot; however, an even greater good and more permanent reform could begin by picking up on the immigration bill S.774, as the president said in his nationally televised address. Although it never came to a vote in the House, the Senate bill is still the best place to start. Embedded in S.744
Related Links: Industry Protests Increased Single-Step Design-Build by the Corps (subscription required) House DOD Bill Includes Design-Build, Individual-Sureties Amendments Small business is the beating heart of the American economy, and when the Senate next gets down to business on Nov. 12, no matter which party is in control, it has a rare chance to help entrepreneurs who have contracts with the U.S. government or work under federal contracting rules.The House already has passed legislation sought by the construction industry that will make federal construction fairer, more cost-effective and less prone to fraud. Whether those measures make it into the Senate
Related Links: New Misclassification Law Takes Effect in Texas Contract to Cheat: The McClatchy Report on Payroll Fraud Decades since it was first recognized, the deliberate misclassification of workers by contractors remains a big problem. Federal legislation, reintroduced last year, is likely to go nowhere, so it's worth asking what, if anything, has worked at the state level. As it turns out, there are some promising examples, even if none of them can serve as a perfect template for national law.Briefly, an employer who intentionally misclassifies a worker as an independent contractor is able to avoid paying state and federal
Related Links: Obama Directs Federal Contractors To List Labor Violations Text of President Obama's Executive Order The Obama administration's second-term frustrations are getting the better of common sense. On July 31, President Obama issued an executive order to "crack down on federal contractors who put workers' safety and hard-earned pay at risk," requiring them to self-report recent violations. The goal is to make federal construction contractors safer and more law-abiding, but it may simply overwhelm contracting officers with a surge of new data and saddle federal contractors with burdensome requirements. The Associated Builders and Contractors is already talking lawsuit, earning
Related Links: Aviation Board Scraps Proposals for New Orleans Terminal Board Hits Reset Button on New Orleans Airport Contract Bid protests remind us of video reviews by the referees at a football game: The review slows down the action to provide a clearer picture of what occurred, even if the interpretation isn't always as definitive as hoped. So, when a review committee scoring the construction manager-at-risk competition for a new terminal at New Orleans airport flubbed its first try, the losing team protested and later prevailed.The full New Orleans Aviation Board now must make a final decision, hopefully with some
Related Links: AECOM's $6B Offer for URS Keeps the Company Whole AECOM’s $6-billion acquisition of URS, creating the second largest construction services company, continues the trend of consolidation among construction services players. The 10 largest design and engineering firms have tripled in size since 2003—largely through mergers and acquisitions.The transaction creates a new global player with nearly $20 billion in revenue and nearly 100,000 employees across 150 countries.At the same time, this transaction highlights the challenges of pursuing profitable growth in the sector, given the struggles over the past few years at URS, itself the product of serial acquisitions. DANNIn the
Related Links: States Laws Related to Immigration and Immigrants The U.S. badly needs a comprehensive reform of its federal immigration policies, instead of leaving each state to cope with recent crises on its own, which is what's been happening lately. Since comprehensive reform is dead for 2014, the Obama administration may make a limited gesture toward reform via executive order or regulation that grants undocumented immigrants more leeway to remain in the U.S. and improves border security. If that happens, some Republican opponents may throw up their hands in exasperation with the president, although each side's basic position on these
Related Links: Plan to Refill Highway Fund Stokes Conflict in Congress If Congress ever progresses beyond its current partisan dysfunction, perhaps we will look back on June 18 as a turning point. That was the day Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) proposed raising the federal gasoline tax 12¢ a gallon over two years as a way to end the impending deficit of the Highway Trust Fund, the key source of highway and mass transit construction funds shared with the states. The tax hasnot been raised since 1993, when Congress upped it from 14¢ to 18.4¢; fuel-efficient cars
Images Courtesy of BIG Related Links: Manhattan's Storm-Protection Plan Intended as Global Urban Model No need for intrusive barriers and floodgates in the middle of New York Harbor. If a $335-million pilot project, funded by the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, is successful, instead of massive hard infrastructure to defend Lower Manhattan against the next Superstorm Sandy, the Big Apple eventually will have a 10-mile surge defense camouflaged as parkland, landscape and public art.One of the architects for the project called BIG U—the most ambitious of six schemes that recently won HUD's "Rebuild by Design" competition—is so excited
Related Links: Project Delivery Spat Puts Hospital Job on Critical List Emerging Senate VA Bill to Have Panel on Construction Issues Orlando Sentinel on Delayed Completion of VA Hospital In addition to improving its responsiveness to veterans' medical problems, the U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs needs to revamp its construction strategies and practices on big hospital projects and possibly hand off construction to public-private partnership concessionaires. Two hospital projects, in Aurora, Colo., and Orlando, Fla., show how the VA comes up short on large, complex new hospitals.The Orlando project, on which the prime contractor is Brasfield & Gorrie, is over
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