The article “With Retainage Mandate Gone, A-Es Look Forward to Payday” seems to suggest that retainage on federal contracts is no longer an issue. While the new rule is a step in the right direction by making retainage “optional,” the fact is that federal contracting officers still may resort to this practice at whim. div id="articleExtrasA" div id="articleExtrasB" div id="articleExtras" The rule states, “The contracting officer can withhold up to 10% of the payment due in any billing period, when the contracting officer determines that such a withholding is necessary to protect the Government’s interest.” We would like to see

Your editorial (“The Gulf Oil-Spill Disaster Is Engineering’s Shame,”) is an insult and assault on the engineering profession. ENR should retract the editorial because it misplaces responsibility, cites an honorable profession as something far less than deserved, makes an outlandish connection between disasters such as Three Mile Island, the Challenger, Hurricane Katrina and the BP Oil Spill and the engineering profession as a whole. It also indicts a profession with only a slight mention of what the engineering profession has contributed to the world’s society. Your lame point that somehow “engineers have to help each other protect against corporate power

Raising the Quality Of The ‘Integration’ Debate The A/E/C industry will benefit greatly from Nadine M. Post’s recent article “Integrated Project Delivery Boosters Ignore Many Flashing Red Lights”. The article raises the quality of the debate about integration’s benefits and how best to achieve them. Integrated project delivery (IPD) offers a variety of advantages in aligning the interests of the parties engaged in delivering a project. Its various forms rely heavily on building trust and cooperation among participants while engaging the general contractor (GC) and key subcontractors earlier in the design process. However, very similar results are achieved on traditional,

ENR Clarifies Key Issues Unresolved in BIM, IPD I wanted to express my gratitude for the series on building information modeling and integrated project delivery that Nadine Post delivered through the pages of ENR, most recently in “Integrated-Project-Delivery Boosters Ignore Many Flashing Red Lights”. Post brings a level of discernment that was lacking in other attempts to cover these complex, interrelated subjects. The primary difference between this approach and the others is a willingness to address specific areas in which these tools and forms of agreement require further development. The credibility of ENR and the objectivity of the articles encourage

Offshore Legal Relief Costly and Unlikely Missing from your otherwise clear reporting in “Chinese Drywall Cases Mount” is the fact that getting a legal judgment against a foreign corporation and/or manufacturer is far different from actually collecting the judgment against them. ENR should cover this issue to help homeowners manage unrealistic expectations as well as help plaintiffs judge how much money they should spend in court to get a potentially hollow judgment. When the pockets empty out at the top (in this case, Taishan Gypsum), the trickle-down liability, finger-pointing and collateral lawsuits could be endless. William a. Tolbert Chairman and

Disney Concert Hall Redux As president of the owner/operator of Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, I read with interest the article on Frank Gehry’s Beekman Tower. While it was generally informative, I wish to correct serious errors in the first paragraph. Walt Disney Concert Hall is a complex structure perfectly designed and suited to its purpose. As such, the design and construction team were, indeed, confronted with challenges that far exceed those of Beekman Tower. To say that Disney Hall was “tortuous” to build is like saying a Wagner opera is “tortuous” to perform. Such profoundly important and

Graphics Are Misleading In Stimulus Story I would like to point out that the circular graphics used on pages 26-29 in the cover story “As Federal Dollars Pour Out, A Second Stimulus Plan Grows” are inappropriately used. These charts compare obligated funds to ARRA Total Allocations by using the ration of the diameters, not the ration of the areas. As such, they visually mislead the viewer into believing more funds remain to be spent. The chart on page 29 is the most egregious example. Values below the chart indicate that $2.1 billion of the total $5.5 billion in this category

Cultivate Safety Culture, Not Personal Records For more than 10 years, the injury, illness and fatality rates for construction workers have declined dramatically. According to the latest federal data, construction’s injury and illness rate has been cut by more than half in 2008 from what it was 10 years earlier. The fatality rate was down 47% over the same period and hit an all-time low in 2008. Ask any contractor: The plan is to bring the rate down to zero. Credit for improved jobsite safety can be attributed to construction contractors that have committed to ensuring their workers go home

Bankruptcy Rebuttals I am writing to express my disappointment in the reporting offered concerning Schwing America and our Chapter 11 proceedings. As a longtime ENR reader and advertiser, I had respected your publication for getting facts correct and telling the whole story. This was not up to your standards. Wells Fargo presented objections to our motion for the continued use of cash collateral in the Nov. 27 filing, which you reference in your article. This motion was to be reviewed in Federal Bankruptcy Court on Dec. 2. Schwing America strongly disputed the logic used by Wells Fargo in its objections

This year, for the first time, ENR will not be mailing out printed copies of the ENR Top 100/400/500 survey forms. The surveys will be online and can be completed through our interactive online form. Survey participants already on our mailing list will receive a letter containing the company ID and password needed to complete the online form. Others also can file online or download and print out the survey from ENR.com in .pdf format or as a zipped set of .doc files. If you need a company ID and password or have other questions about the survey process, please