It was dusk. The 31-foot sloop cut silently southward through the smooth Hudson River on New York City’s west side. Joe Barone sat at the wheel and let the breeze sift through his silver-flecked hair on this balmy August evening.
Related Links: Global Contract Disputes Worth Less But Last Longer Disputed Shift by Insurance Brokers Entangles Contractors' Clients When a legal dispute arises on a construction project, contractors should take immediate, proactive steps to help resolve the claim. Key factors include balancing parties' knowledge of the incident, controlling the claims process and managing associated costs.Traditionally, construction professionals have relied on a combination of dispute-resolution strategies, including direct negotiations between company executives, mediation or a customized neutral process, arbitration and litigation. But skilled negotiators have recognized that whichever process is chosen, to be successful, it must be designed and managed on
Related Links: Singapore Building and Construction Authority The U.S. Green Building Council In Singapore's densely built-up urban environment, with limited land and few natural resources, greening buildings is vital to sustainability and one of the most effective ways for a city to reduce its carbon footprint. As recently as the 1990s, countries in tropical and subtropical regions had few existing guidelines. What did exist originated primarily in the U.S. and Europe and didn't necessarily apply to Singapore's very different climate.By the mid 2000s, the Building and Construction Authority began developing our own green-building rating tool designed specifically for tropical conditions:
No less a tribunal than the U.S. Supreme Court will try to clarify construction-industry conflict about where lawsuits between primes and subs are tried. Lower courts have disagreed about what to do, but the prevailing industry wisdom is that it is best to try prime-sub disputes near the project location. Yet some primes insist subs sign "forum selection" clauses, which require trials in the prime's home state—and subs continue to cave in and sign them. Neither action speaks well for the state of risk-management in the construction industry. Despite the forum-selection clauses, many subs will sue locally for money they
Related Links: ASA Supports Sub in Forum-Selection Cases Homepage of Bigane Paving Why is it still a radical idea that subcontractors and vendors should be paid promptly for work properly performed? While a lot has changed about this aspect of the construction industry, old forms of payment abuse continue and some new ones are becoming popular. If the industry doesn't reform itself, I promise that subcontractors will push for new laws against these practices.When my Chicago firm, Bigane Paving, works as a subcontractor, most final payment on public work comes about a year after completion, but it can take as
Related Links: How to Make CPM Tools Human-Friendly, Truthful The Last Planner (R) System For an industry striving to be more productive, the current state of scheduling practices is wasteful. To learn how to "right-plan" our projects and achieve better results, we first must look closely at our own scheduling practices and create a dialogue within the industry about which practices are efficient and which are not. While there is still a role for traditional critical-path-method (CPM) scheduling as a high-level, strategic road map, there is often too much detail in schedules.LAMBSchedules with an exhaustive level of detail in a
Related Links: The National Association of Insurance Commissioners Surety Fraud Probe Raises Question: Who is Melde Rutledge? State-level public works face different challenges than do larger federal public works when it comes to performing due diligence against surety-bond fraud. For federal contracts, prime contractors can require subcontractor bonds from Treasury-listed or A.M. Best-rated sureties and check the surety in a federal public database, which helps. State and local public works don't require the federal level of scrutiny,and contracts between primes and subs are private, so due diligence mostly involves meetings and financial record reviews.If a concerned contractor wants to search
Related Links: Beware the Recovery: What History Teaches More Room for Gloom on Recovery The unprecedented market downturn from which we are emerging has weakened some construction organizations to the extent that they may have difficulty financing the growth that will come with even a slow market recovery. That, in turn, may increase the potential for defaults. But some of the common ways of dealing with the risks may be self-defeating. Here's what I mean: General contractors and subcontractors have the same exposure—if either type of contractor fails, the entire project is disrupted, and all involved are exposed to disruption
Related Links: The Clemson Highway 93 Pedestrian Bridge Clemson University in South Carolina is almost finished building a new pedestrian bridge that runs parallel to a four-lane road between the campus, where I work, and downtown, where I live. With big piles of dirt, heavy equipment and lots of rebar and concrete, it's the kind of construction site that excites us.The finished product is going to look great and be much safer than the narrow sidewalk that was there before. As if that weren't enough, the bridge connects into Clemson's soccer stadium, my main source of entertainment in the fall.
Related Links: Good Guys, Wiseguys, and Putting Up Buildings: A Life in Construction The summer of 1963—remembered mostly for the March on Washington—was marked in the construction industry by the arrival of affirmative action. I don't believe I had ever heard the term before, but its entry into our lives was truly dramatic and, a half century later, worth recalling now. In New York City, starting in mid-Juneand lasting for a full five months, work was halted on the $25-million annex being built for Harlem Hospital. Pickets, alleging discrimination against blacks and Puerto Ricans in the construction trades, introduced a
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