CalGEO - The California Geotechnical Engineering Association

President's Message

July 2010 - by John Hoobs (Geocon, Inc.)

CalGeo Looks Ahead

It helps to know history when you want to look ahead. That helped create focus at CalGeo as we went through our extensive self evaluation last year. We wanted to make our organization more relevant as we went through a strategic planning process in late 2008 and then a bylaws review and update in 2009. Through it all we started to understand more of our 39 years of history and likely went full circle as we finally realized who we really are. We determined that the most important aspect of CalGeo was that we are the only geotechnical engineering organization in the state that represents the needs of the profession. It seems obvious now but through much growing pains and good input from our membership and past presidents we have refocused again on being The California Geotechnical Engineering Association for our membership. We looked inside our organization to make it stronger. Now we will look outside to make it grow. This year we created a new structure for communicating with our members by launching a new web site in May with updated dropdown menus that allows the user more access to information. The web site will be an incredible tool in the future to retain information and to communicate with our membership. In addition, we created new brochures and handouts that explain our focus as an organization. We started a monthly newsletter in 2009 called e.Geo that is electronically sent to over 500 people. We also organized our banking and bookkeeping to allow accounting tasks to be performed electronically and provide access to more real time information.

The directors of CalGeo are working hard to support our membership in several areas. The bad economy dictates each company's workload, and there is not much we can do to influence it, but added to a bad economy are bad legislative measures and legal rulings that can wreak havoc to our fragile businesses. Our legislative committee headed by Mike Laney has become a much more current and active group that tracks legislative bills and legal rulings by providing updates through the e.Geo. Our lobbyist and our association with ACEC have improved the speed on which we distribute the information and helped us become more active in writing and communicating our position on bills and legal judgments. Our Student Outreach committee is headed by Hannes Richter and has continued to grow and interact with engineering students. We added Fresno State University to our student chapter group and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo has started to organize themselves through the ASCE student chapter. We were fortunate enough to host 3 schools and 10 students at our annual conference in La Jolla and heard from several students on their graduate research and their retaining wall design competition with the Geo-Institute. Our Programs Committee is headed by Larry Taylor and they created a hugely successful conference with a list of impressive speakers. Our attendee reviews were highly favorable and the conference format was well liked. We will be broadcasting our next regional meeting in June to several locations across the state to help connect members, increase participation, and reduce travel time for the speaker and membership. We will broadcast our talk to member companies in Eureka, San Luis Obispo, San Ramon, Fresno, Rancho Cordova, and Sacramento, along with our speaker location in Irvine. We are excited because we will be able to capture and retain the talk on our web site to allow member access to each meeting. We hope to use this format in the future to allow more of our membership to participate and interact with their fellow geotechnical professionals in their local communities.

I wanted to close my last message as president by thanking the membership and board of directors for their support. Our board has learned to appreciate that Geotechnical Engineering is our professional family. I also want to thank Marsha Myers and Jean Yurkovic for their hard work in making CalGeo successful by performing our administrative tasks. I now leave you in the good hands of our next leader Siamak Jafroudi as the 40th president of a great organization. He will continue the goals of the strategic plan by concentrating on increasing membership now that we are set with our administrative framework. We determined that the number one goal of the next fiscal year will be to reach and connect all the geotechnical engineering companies across the state and to add those companies that want to participate to our membership.

Sponsored Links »