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PREFACE:

Your project is stopped! The community is outraged that you are not hiring locally. The press is following the politicians around as they claim you are creating an eyesore for their constituents.

 The building department seems to be slow in issuing permits for your particular project and no one knows why. An ancestral burial ground has been unearthed on your site right next to the leaking oil tank from the land-marked outhouse that you were going to demolish until the preservationists started screaming.

 And then an adorable whooping crane couple decides to nest in your de-watering zone. You sigh and decide to go around the corner for a cup of coffee only to discover that one of the community activists has put your photograph on a web page, and you are being mobbed by angry neighbors.

 In the 1960’s, you could have awakened and that all would have been a bad dream. Now, it is your life. You as the construction professional must not only be able, technically, to build the building, but must be able to get it built amid all sorts of adverse forces that have a power today that they have never had before.

 In some cases, the power is legislated and in some cases it is not, but in all cases it is capable of slowing or halting your project. Gone are the days when you can rip down a building in the middle of the night as Harry Maclowe did in New York in 1967; or use uranium trappings to make concrete as the federal government did in Colorado in 1971; or build plants that excrete toxic waste as Dow did at Love Canal. 

Federal mandates enacted during the 1960s and 1970s for government projects had the net effect of empowering the public on all types of projects. Now there are regulations about everything.

 People believe that individually and collectively they have a right to know about and to influence the progress and outcome of any project. Jurisdictional borders are nebulous enough for the projects to be slowed or stopped even if they are being built “as-of-right” (without the need for any regulatory approvals). Design and construction now go hand in hand with policy, people, and process.