I found this article http://tinyurl.com/y9mqtes by Alex Carrick (REED Construction Data) to be rather interesting. After a considerable drop in construction pricing from October 2008 to October of 2009, the tides/trends are quickly changing as prices begin to soar. Couple this with the banks tight lending practices and our governors anti-business mentality, and a not so rosy picture starts coming into focus.
Setting aside bank lending for a moment, with retail foreclosures looming, municipalities are going to be faced with an ever growing number of shuttered retail centers and a steep decline in manufacturing starts. Communities that are more business friendly when it comes to engineering requirements and material selections will see their phones ringing far more often than municipalities that require industrial building prospects to make their simple buildings look like a dairy farmer dressed in a tuxedo in a milking parlor.
It doesn't take a rabid Monty Python fan to realize municipalities will need to lighten up and that banks will need to loosen-up so that builders, developers, retailers and manufacturers can afford the material increased for casted in the article by Alex Carrick.
Nice blog.
ReplyDeleteI would not be optimistic about any changes to the municipal engineering requirements for development project. The requirements will continue to grow for the following reasons:
1. Engineering consultants hired by municipalities increasing rely on the municipal revenue with the reduction in private development; the more detailed and extensive the review by the consultant the more that the consultants increase their revenue and their role and importance with the municipalities.
2. In general, the staffs that review development projects do not factor the cost, both soft cost and construction cost of development projects.
3. The politicians who actually could change the extensive review process and requirements either does not fully understand the engineering requirements or are unwilling to challenge the engineering and planning staff or the hired consultants.
4. Finally government requirements, rules and programs trend to grow over time. Often when there is a problem with a specific development the response is to add a new requirement, without sufficient evaluation about the long term cost that the requirements will have when broadly applied.
Any hope that this will change will only happen by political pressure place on the elected officials to then pressure the staff to change the development requirements. There of course are always exceptions and some reviewers and municipalities apply a more reasonable common sense approach. Unfortunately this is becoming much more the exception then the rule.
Chris Jackson, PE, RLS
Presindent of CJ Engineering