» Monthly Archives: November 2008
You can pay for it now or pay for it later — advice to quarries on community ties
Being a good corporate neighbor takes a lot of time and effort—but the rewards are significant, particularly for quarry and concrete firms that hope to expand operations in their community, writes Chris Hopkins, The Saint Consulting Group's senior vice president for aggregates and mining, in Concrete Answers.
Citing the case of Rohrer's Quarry, which has experienced ...
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Obama stimulus package boosts construction industry poised for rebound
Both the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Telegraph in London see a potential construction boom in the massive public spending programme now expected from President-elect Barack Obama when he takes office in January.
Obama hasn't offered details, but anticipating a surge in public-works spending, investors bid up construction and engineering stocks. URS Corp., a San ...
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Landowners oppose Virginia county bid to block rural sprawl
Stafford County, the onetime home of founding father George Washington, wants to halt sprawl in the Virginia countryside near Fredericksburg, but it is struggling to persuade rural landholders to sell their development rights to the county rather than to developers.
Response to a mail survey by the committee two years ago indicated a majority against the ...
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Wind energy plans hit turbulence from recession, transmission and ethics issues
Recent reports suggest that wind energy plans have hit turbulence from economic recession, the daunting scale of transmission grid upgrades and even a code of ethics to avoid corrupt practices. Not all the news is bad, though. See bottom of post for news from Washington State and Canada.
The global economic turmoil has started having an ...
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Would NIMBYism, green protests stop or delay Depression-era public projects?
The famous symbols of recovery in the West during the Depression included Hoover Dam, Grand Coulee Dam, the San Francisco Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. But if proposed today, they may well have been delayed or killed by environmental purists, NIMBY activists and overly cautious politicians and bureaucrats, Bill Boyarsky writes in The ...
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Crumbling roads $13B stimulus is win-win for infrastructure and economy
One-third of all highway deaths are blamed on poor road conditions, and America's crumbling transportation infrastructure costs the public billions of dollars every year.
Any doubt about the potentially horrific consequences of ignoring the problem was proven folly by last year's catastrophic highway bridge collapse that killed 10 people and injured more than 100 in Minnesota.
Yet ...
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US offshore wind power – Sun & Wind Energy report on next business frontier
Offshore wind power is well established in Europe but is only just finding its feet in the United States.
With the first offshore wind project on the East Coast having passed a major hurdle with the first-ever signed power purchase agreement and other projects in the pipeline, U.S. offshore wind power is gaining traction, reports Sun ...
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UK Coal, Peel in wind partnership to turn old coal mines to renewable power
Coal mines are the last thing that come to mind when thinking about renewable energy, but a new partnership between UK Coal and Peel Group, a UK power company, plans to turn more than a dozen former coal mine sites into renewable power plants, putting up wind turbines to generate up to 133 megawatts (MW) ...
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Calpers faces huge losses in property slump, REITs value halved in 6 weeks
The California Public Employees' Retirement System, the nation's largest public pension fund, suffered $3.3 billion paper losses for the year ended June 30, paying dearly for its aggressive real-estate investments, according to the Los Angeles Times and other news reports.
More recent losses mount from investments Calpers made in over 100 property companies before their value ...
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Grim Q3 for housing slump: 1 in 7 homes in negative equity — Zillow report
The latest batch of grim statistics on the housing slump show that roughly 14 percent of homeowners -- one in seven -- have negative equity or owe more than their house is worth, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The third quarter report on 163 metropolitan areas from Zillow.com, the Seattle-based firm that informs neighbors on the ...
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