Brown and Caldwell Appoints Stigers as Design Chief Engineer
December 13, 2022 —
Brown and CaldwellWALNUT CREEK, Calif., Dec. 06, 2022 — Brown and Caldwell today announces Vice President Tracy Stigers has been appointed as design chief engineer in recognition of four decades of exceptional technical leadership and client service. She is the first woman in the firm's 75-year history to hold the esteemed title.
Stigers will lead all design from a technical and delivery expertise perspective across all of Brown and Caldwell's design initiatives, implementing innovation, quality control, and project delivery throughout North America and the Pacific.
Since joining the leading environmental engineering and construction services firm in 1980, Stigers has progressed from junior engineer to one of its top technical and delivery experts. She has vast experience in the design and construction of large-scale wastewater conveyance, treatment, and reuse facilities, including serving as project manager on the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission's $2.3 billion Biosolids Digester Facilities Project, the largest value design job in Brown and Caldwell's history.
Early in her career, Stigers worked alongside and was mentored by company co-founder Dave Caldwell, helping shape its tradition of solving the most challenging water and environmental challenges. Her dedication to upholding Brown and Caldwell's reputation for project excellence and innovation was commended by CEO Rich D'Amato:
"Tracy is the epitome of quality, commitment, and technical prowess," he said. "Her leadership, knowledge, and legacy of delivering solutions to clients perfectly embody our heritage and is a shining example for tomorrow's aspiring engineering leaders."
Throughout her career, Stigers has held numerous leadership roles at industry organizations, including sitting on the board of trustees for the Water Environment Federation and the California Water Environment Association. She is a current member of the Clarkson University Engineering Advisory Council.
About Brown and Caldwell
Headquartered in Walnut Creek, California, Brown and Caldwell is a full-service environmental engineering and construction services firm with 52 offices and 1,800 professionals across North America and the Pacific. For 75 years, our creative solutions have helped municipalities, private industry, and government agencies successfully overcome their most challenging water and environmental obstacles. As an employee-owned company, Brown and Caldwell is passionate about exceeding our clients' expectations and making a difference for our employees, our communities, and our environment. For more information, visit www.brownandcaldwell.com
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Connecticut Crumbling Concrete Cases Not Covered Under "Collapse" Provision in Homeowner's Policy
July 01, 2019 —
Kerianne E. Kane - Saxe Doernberger & Vita, P.C.What do you do when your house falls out from underneath you? Over the last few years, homeowners in northeastern Connecticut have been suing their insurers for denying coverage for claims based on deteriorating foundations in their homes. The lawsuits, which have come to be known as the “crumbling concrete cases,” stem from the use of faulty concrete to pour foundations of approximately 35,000 homes built during the 1980s and 1990s. In order to save their homes, thousands of homeowners have been left with no other choice but to lift their homes off the crumbling foundations, tear out the defective concrete and replace it. The process typically costs between $150,000 to $350,000 per home, and homeowner’s insurers are refusing to cover the costs. As a result, dozens of lawsuits have been filed by Connecticut homeowners in both state and federal court.
Of those cases, three related lawsuits against Allstate Insurance Company were the first to make it to the federal appellate level.1 The Second Circuit Court of Appeals was tasked with deciding one common issue: whether the “collapse” provision in the Allstate homeowner’s policy affords coverage for gradually deteriorating basement walls that remain standing.
The Allstate policies at issue were “all-risk” policies, meaning they covered “sudden and accidental direct physical losses” to residential properties. While “collapse” losses were generally excluded, the policies did provide coverage for a limited class of “sudden and accidental” collapses, including those caused by “hidden decay,” and/or “defective methods or materials used in construction, repair or renovations.” Covered collapses did not include instances of “settling, cracking, shrinking, bulging or expansion.”
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Kerianne E. Kane, Saxe Doernberger & Vita, P.C.Ms. Kane may be contacted at
kek@sdvlaw.com
Client Alert: Catch Me If You Can – Giorgio Is No Gingerbread Man
November 26, 2014 —
Steven M. Cvitanovic, Jesse M. Sullivan, & Colin T. Murphy - Haight Brown & Bonesteel LLPIn Giorgio v. Synergy Management Group, LLC (2014) Case No. B248752, a California Court of Appeal held in an opinion published on November 6, 2014, that the Los Angeles County trial court did not abuse its discretion in permitting service by publication on Defendant John Giorgio ("Giorgio") after numerous attempts to find his current address produced a single address in Los Angeles from which mailed service was returned. The Court ruled that publication in a Los Angeles newspaper was proper because Plaintiff had a reasonable belief that service by publication in that county was most likely to give actual notice to the party to be served.”
In this intentional tort action, Synergy Management Group, LLC ("Synergy") alleged in its Complaint that Giorgio converted assets of Synergy's assignor by submitting false expense reports which resulted in the misappropriation of the assignor's assets. Synergy personally served Giorgio with the original Complaint at a North Carolina airport and Giorgio failed to respond. Synergy subsequently filed a First Amended Complaint and attempted service via an address in the Netherlands. Again, Giorgio did not respond. Synergy then filed a request for entry of default against Giorgio which was entered that day.
Reprinted courtesy of Haight Brown & Bonesteel LLP attorneys
Steven M. Cvitanovic,
Jesse M. Sullivan and
Colin T. Murphy
Mr. Cvitanovic may be contacted at scvitanovic@hbblaw.com; Mr. Sullivan may be contacted at jsullivan@hbblaw.com; and Mr. Murphy may be contacted at cmurphy@hbblaw.com
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Hilary Soaks California With Flooding Rain and Snarls Flights
August 21, 2023 —
Brian K. Sullivan & Brian Wingfield - BloombergThe remnants of Tropical Storm Hilary pummeled California with record rains on Monday, disrupting flights but sparing its largest cities from widespread destruction.
Across the region, “the ongoing and historic amount of rainfall is expected to cause life-threatening to locally catastrophic” floods, along with landslides and mudslides, the National Hurricane Center said in a notice early Monday.
The storm, now a post-tropical cyclone, has weakened since coming ashore in California late Sunday. As of early Monday, it had maximum sustained winds of about 35 miles (56 kilometers) per hour and is forecast to move across Nevada and dissipate on Monday.
Hilary, a rare storm to hit the Southwest, could bring a year’s worth of rain to parts of a region famous for its usually balmy weather. Heavy rain and flash flooding have already disrupted transportation, and officials warned residents to stay off the roads. In the last 10 years, flooding from rainfall has caused the most deaths from hurricanes and tropical storms in the US.
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Bloomberg
Chinese Hunt for Trophy Properties Boosts NYC, London Prices
January 21, 2015 —
Vinicy Chan – BloombergWhat do New York’s most famous hotel, the Lloyd’s of London building and the headquarters of the U.K.’s top law firm have in common? They’re all owned by Chinese insurers.
This new breed of buyers, who weren’t allowed to invest overseas before 2012, are flooding into the global market for prime commercial real estate after being given more freedom to deploy their $1.6 trillion of assets. That has meant good times for sellers of trophy real estate in major cities.
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Vinicy Chan, BloombergMs. Chan may be contacted at
vchan91@bloomberg.net
Reconstructing the Francis Scott Key Bridge Utilizing the Progressive Design-Build Method
June 04, 2024 —
Lisa D. Love - The Dispute ResolverHaving awakened on the morning of March 26 to the devastating news of the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge after being struck by the Dali, a 984 length /52 beam foot cargo container ship, I thought of the many times I crossed the bridge as a child growing up in Washington, D.C. I also recalled Montgomery Schyler’s comments on the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, when he stated that “the work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge.”
I thought of the beauty of New York’s Mario Cuomo Bridge, a 3.1-mile cable-stayed twin-span bridge with eight traffic lanes, bicycle and pedestrian paths, six lookout points and room for future rapid transit. It was completed in 2018 and constructed under a design-build procurement model[i] at a cost of $3.98 billion. Accelerated bridge construction (ABC) techniques were utilized in its construction. ABC techniques employ innovative planning, design, materials, and construction methods in a safe and cost-effective manner to reduce the on-site construction time that occurs when building new bridges or replacing and rehabilitating existing ones. ABC techniques improve site constructability, total project delivery time, work-zone safety for the traveling public and traffic impacts, on-site construction time, and weather-related time delays.[ii]
I also thought of the gracefulness of Boston’s Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge, a 0.27-mile hybrid cable-stayed steel and concrete bridge with pedestrian and bicycle access that holds 10 lanes of traffic. The Zakim Bridge was completed in 2004 at a cost of approximately $100 million as part of the $24.3 billion Big Dig.[iii] Despite its elegant, streamlined appearance, the bridge was designed to be exceptionally strong, withstand winds over 400 miles per hour and endure a magnitude 7.9 earthquake.[iv]
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Lisa D. Love, JAMS
Are You a Construction Lienor?
November 15, 2017 —
David Adelstein - Florida Construction Legal UpdatesWhen it comes to construction lien rights, not everyone that touches the project is a proper lienor. Forget about timely serving a Notice to Owner or recording a claim of lien, if you are not a proper lienor, it does not matter if you properly perfected your lien rights. If you are not a proper lienor, you have NO lien rights under the law!
Florida Statue s. 713.01(18) defines a lienor as follows:
(18) “Lienor” means a person who is:
(a) A contractor;
(b) A subcontractor;
(c) A sub-subcontractor;
(d) A laborer;
(e) A materialman who contracts with the owner, a contractor, a subcontractor, or a sub-subcontractor; or
(f) A professional lienor under s. 713.03;
and who has a lien or prospective lien upon real property under this part, and includes his or her successor in interest. No other person may have a lien under this part.
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David Adelstein, Florida Construction Legal UpdatesMr. Adelstein may be contacted at
Dadelstein@gmail.com
Seven Key Issues for Construction Professionals to Consider When Dealing With COVID-19
April 13, 2020 —
Jason Adams - Linked InBy now every construction professional has been inundated with articles regarding the impacts of COVID-19 on the construction industry. The sheer volume of information is overwhelming and changes by the hour. This article is intended to summarize key issues affecting construction professionals and serve as a general road map for navigating the crisis.
1. Determine Project Status
The first consideration is whether the construction projects at issue are allowed to proceed given “shelter in place” and related orders.
Generally speaking, Governor Newsom has deemed construction to be essential and, therefore, exempt from California’s “Safer at Home” order. There is some debate as to whether the governor’s order takes priority over contradictory local (City and County) orders. For example, some Northern California counties and the City of Berkeley have issued orders expressly providing that their local orders legally supersede the State order because the local orders are more restrictive.
If a local ordinance, public entity representative, or the project owner orders the project to shut down, the parties will need to make a fact specific determination regarding how to proceed at that time.
If the project proceeds, employee safety is paramount. In the City of Los Angeles employers are required to develop a “comprehensive COVID-19 exposure control plan” that includes a laundry list of safety requirements. Regardless of the jurisdiction, the parties must err on the side of caution and comply with social distancing (six feet), refrain from holding meetings, and close the project to the public. Anyone who can work remotely should be encouraged to do so.
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Jason Adams, Gibbs GidenMr. Adams may be contacted at
jadams@gibbsgiden.com
