lohman

Summary Notes on the APWA Meeting on Sunday, 10 September 2000

Summarized by Jim Yao, 9/12/00

There were approximately 20 participants at the APWA meeting in Louisville, KY on Sunday, 10 September 2000. There were five presenters as follows: Jim Yao (with Jose Roesset) of TAMU, John Ostrowski of APWA, Kristen Sanford Bernhardt of University of Missouri at Columbia (with Sue McNeil of University of Illinois at Chicago), Roy Sparrow of New York University, and Will Price of the University of Pacific. Jerry Fay, President of APWA who invited Yao/Roesset to present a paper at this meeting, was one of the participants. Also present was a former student of Jose's (who took CEE 674 from Professor Roesset at MIT), Dr. John Miller. John is now an associate professor at MIT.

Following 5- to 10-minute presentations for each of these five papers, Dennis Ross of APWA led the discussion on the following questions:

During the discussion, Dennis asked one of the key APWA officials to comment on it. This participant said, "The existing infrastructure was designed to carry automobiles. During the forthcoming 21^st Century, we will no longer have automobiles. Therefore, we do not need any more engineers because we do not know what kind of infrastructure we will manage." The essence of his comments was that there is no role for engineers to play in infrastructure management during the next century. I agree with John Miller who said: "There were steam engines, then railroads, then cars and airplanes. Engineers learn problem-solving skills and can adapt to new challenges whatever they will be." I also made a plea for uncertainty and risk analysis. Although some participants dismissed it as an academic exercise, Professor Price strongly endorsed it. He said that public works managers should know the risks involved by using the earthquake risk in California as an example.

From my viewpoint, there seemed to be more public administrators than engineers among participants at this meeting. In addition to the above-mentioned comment, another non-engineer participant stated that he would not hire engineers to do the job of project managers. Moreover, some of the engineers present seemed to be disenchanted and are embarrassed about their engineering background. At least a couple of them agreed with a statement that, as engineers, they would not have occupied the public administrators' positions (they tried to de-emphasize it when they applied for public works managerial jobs).

Dennis will summarize results of this discussion with the assistance of other APWA officials. He plans to circulate his draft summary among participants in the near future. All papers that were presented at this meeting will be peer-reviewed for possible publication in the APWA Journal.