The Oregon chapter of the National Association of Minority Contractors believes that the real disparities that exist are much greater than recent studies compiled for the city of Portland show.

NAMC-Oregon, a nonprofit building trades association, last week released its initial response to results of studies commissioned in 2009. The studies looked at how often the city and the Portland Development Commission used certified minority- or women-owned firms on their projects in comparison to the number of those firms available for use. Read the 91��Ƶ’s analysis of the studies

“The city’s and PDC’s contracting programs are far from ‘OK’,” the statement said. “The city, PDC and the community cannot be satisfied with a contracting process that sees no prime contracts awarded to an African-American or Asian-American firm over a four-year period.

“In fact, substantial disparities were found for these firms as well as Hispanic-owned firms for prime contracts, even under the city’s Good Faith Efforts (Minority/Women/Emerging Small Business) program.”

The nonprofit also took issue with the finding that minority-owned firms receive less than 0.5 percent of contracting dollars for PDC-sponsored projects – those in which the public agency is not the only financial contributor.

Due to recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings, the studies were needed for the city to maintain its Good Faith Effort program and the PDC to continue use of its Business and Workforce Equity policy.

“NAMC-Oregon acknowledges that the city’s disparity study was a necessary step to identifying and addressing the underutilization of all the talents that Portland’s metropolitan area has to offer, including those of minority-owned businesses,” the statement said. “The study does not, however, address some critical issues that disproportionately affect minority communities in the Portland area (such as) poverty, schools that don’t educate our children, and the historical remnants of societal discrimination that continues to plague the creation and growth of many minority-owned businesses.”

According to the statement, NAMC-Oregon, like the other organizations that have responded to the study, is looking forward to working with the city to identify ways to eliminate the disparities.

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Links to the studies

The city of Portland shelled out nearly a million dollars to learn how minority- and women-owned contractors are being employed on its construction projects.

Now it must decide how to best use the results.

Earlier this month both the city of Portland and its economic development agency, the Portland Development Commission, received results from the studies, which were commissioned in 2009. Disparities were identified in how often the PDC used minority- and women-owned companies compared to availability.

“The numbers are what they are, and they’re not a surprise,” said Sam Brooks, founder of the Oregon Association of Minority Entrepreneurs and president of Brooks Staffing. “But the study isn’t the remedy. It needs to be used to bring the public and private sides together so they can form a partnership and come up with solutions.”

The studies, conducted by a Denver-based consulting firm, total more than 1,500 pages. The study of the city of Portland essentially found no disparities in how often it used minority- or women-owned construction firms or construction-related professional services on its projects compared to the availability of those types of firms in the area.

In fact, the city actually used minority-owned, construction-related (including architectural or engineering) professional services 28.2 percent of the time, even though their availability was only 7.2 percent.

For the PDC, however, the consulting firm found disparities in five of eight categories studied for projects between July 2004 and June 2009 – the same time frame evaluated for the city.

On PDC-owned projects – where the PDC was the only, or main, source of public funding – there was only a small disparity in how often minority-owned construction firms were used. The PDC utilized these firms 4 percent of the time, even though availability was 6 percent.

Conversely, when the PDC was just a sponsor, some disparities were much larger. On these projects, the contractors used women-owned professional services only 0.1 percent of the time, despite availability of 4.8 percent.

“The biggest take-away from our perspective is that the diversity outcome is much better on projects we own, where we write up the construction contracts, compared to the ones that we only contribute to,” said John Jackley, director of communications and business equity at the PDC. “It’s now about getting the private sector together and having a constructive and frank dialogue on how we can all improve our representation.

“We know that a lot of these larger firms like R&H (Construction), Skanska and Hoffman (Construction) have good programs, but it’s about getting everyone else on the same page too.”

In addition to making the studies available for public comment online, Jackley’s team is trying to meet with every firm and organization possible to obtain their opinions on the results, as well as suggestions that could lead to solutions. Jackley last week met with Saundra Stevens, the executive vice president of the Portland chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

“We’ve known for quite a long time that there is a disparity in professional services, but it’s not the only disparity,” Stevens said. “We don’t have any solutions nailed down yet, but we are excited to have this information at our disposal and we are hopeful that we will be invited to the table when looking at ideas.”

Considering that representation of women- and minority-owned professional service firms was low, Jackley said the PDC’s Business and Workforce Equity Policy could benefit from the addition of a clause that specifically indicates when these firms should be used on projects.

While AIA-Portland has never lobbied for such a clause, Stevens said it would definitely be worth consideration.

“There are a ton of different stances on this, and with the demographics of Oregon it’s hard to determine if that is actually the best course of action or not,” she said. “That’s why we think that all of this information needs to be brought together and discussed with the industry as part of a forum.”

Brooks said OAME already has tentatively scheduled for next month a panel discussion that would bring together all the public agencies that have conducted project studies in the past few years – the city, the PDC, the Port of Portland and the Oregon Department of Transportation – to discuss the disparities.

“The studies note the problem, but dialogue is going to find the solution,” Brooks said. “But you have to actually do it.”

Brooks also pointed out that such studies can be double-edged; results were factors in decisions by both California and Washington to end certification programs for minority- and women-owned firms.

“The program may not be a forever remedy to this problem, but Oregon is vulnerable and we absolutely cannot lose it,” he said. “We need to strengthen it.”

The city and state agencies need to be stricter about making sure their money, even for the projects they sponsor, is being used as they intend it to be used, Brooks said. He noted that the federal government checks in on its projects monthly to make sure women- and minority-owned firms are being utilized appropriately.

“Don’t just wait until the end of the contract when there’s nothing you can do about it,” he said. “The federal government has it figured out. If you aren’t using the representation, they’ll pull your contract.”

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The city of Portland and the Portland Development Commission that examined whether minority-owned and women-owned firms are underutilized or underpaid on city projects.

This most recent disparity study was commissioned in 2009. The study team led by BBC Research & Consulting studied data from 2004 to 2009. The study found that, in general, there were no disparities in the city’s overall utilization of MBEs or WBEs on construction contracts.

The study also examined individual city and PDC programs and their effectiveness of getting more minority representation on contracts and subcontracts. The study showed more minority representation in cases when those programs were in place than when they weren’t.

There is an opportunity for public comment , and there will a public  forum held April 21, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at Keiser Permanente Town Hall, 3704 N. Interstate Ave.

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A new state report shows that 98 percent of all non-federal land that was in forest, agriculture and range land uses in Oregon in 1974 remained in those uses in 2009.

The statistic came out of a by the Oregon Department of Forestry called Forest, Farms and People that examines the evolution of land use in Oregon since some of the state’s first land-use laws were implemented in the early 1970s.

The study noted that the conversion of these resource lands into development lands didn’t slow down dramatically until the mid 1980s, more than ten years after Oregon first implemented its land-use system. Oregon took that long to roll out its new laws, which put a state body over required municipality land-use planning.

However, development on resource lands was high in the 1990s and 2000s. But during the recession in 2007, development declined to its lowest level in the 35-year study period.

The study points out that private land in western Oregon was developed at a faster rate than on the eastern side. The Portland area and parts of Josephine County were the two hot spots for private land development, while Bend was the only place developing these lands on the east side.

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A couple of Home Depot stores in California these days are not only drawing customers seeking to improve their homes, but also scientists seeking to improve energy efficiency in the company’s buildings.

Scientists have teamed up with Home Depot construction officials as part of U.S. Department of Energy run by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory out of the Richland, Wash.-based lab’s Portland office.

The goal is to help companies exceed energy savings from the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers’ Code 90.1-2007 by 50 percent or more. That is no small task, said Michael Baechler, the lab’s senior buildings program manager.

“That’s not an easy number to achieve,” Baechler said. “We’re trying to help them get really aggressive levels of energy efficiency.”

The three-year process creates a symbiotic relationship between the lab and the company. The lab gains several sources of data collection for information on the real-world effectiveness of new energy technologies. Home Depot and other companies gain between $200,000 and $700,000 worth of lab assistance via scientists, technology and resources to help find the best ways to increase energy savings. The companies also cover 20 percent of project costs.

After studies are finished, companies can choose to incorporate new technology or features, although it’s too soon to know exactly which would work best for the company and which would not, said David Oshinski, director of construction for the company.

“Some of these things we may or may not incorporate into our existing stores; it depends on the things we do and what is most feasible,” he said.

Part of the lab’s goal is to encourage and help groups with a significant number of buildings across the country to save energy in the future. It’s in the nation’s interest to do that, Baechler said.

“You want to get new technologies into the market, make them easily accessible and get the costs down as quickly as possible,” he said.

For the first part of Home Depot’s project, which began a few months ago, lab contractors set up equipment in two California stores to monitor energy efficiency of several products and processes already in use.

“They put meters on all sorts of things,” Oshinski said. “You can use that information as a baseline to see where you are in the energy model.”

For example, some monitoring devices were added to HVAC systems, store lights, computers and around insulation in ceilings and walls, he added.

Home Depot already uses several energy-saving features in its stores, but this project will go well beyond that, said Stephen Holmes, a spokesman.

Some existing features include energy-efficient, rooftop air-conditioning units; LED lighting for building signs; computerized energy management systems for lighting and HVAC systems; and white rooftops to minimize heat buildup.

The company’s previous efforts have led to more than 2.6 billion kilowatt-hours of power savings since 2004, he added.

That makes the energy-saving technology effort even more complex and interesting, said Ron Nesse, the lab’s program manager for the project.

“They’re doing more than we’d hoped,” Nesse said of Home Depot officials. “They’re using this as an experimental device, but they also want to use it as a possible flagship idea for sustainability and energy efficiency at their other stores.”

After data is gathered on things like insulation, parking lot lighting and building size specifications, scientists will work with the company to provide advice and technology during construction of a new Home Depot store in Lodi, Calif., Nesse said.

“Some of the technologies we’ll be testing are proprietary, but there will be some off-the-shelf things we’ll look at as well,” Nesse said. “In the parking lots, for example, we’ve suggested some new LED lighting types.”

One of the interesting parts of this project is that technology savings can’t impact the look of the facility or its overall operations, he added.

So for the parking lot at the new store, special LED lights can’t look different than those used in other lots where the store will be built.

“It’s going into a mall-like area,” Nesse said. “And one of the concerns there is that the lights match. We’re helping them pick lights that do that, and in general we don’t think you can tell the difference. We’re also looking at going back to the developer of that mall and gauging their interest in using the same energy-efficient lights throughout the complex.”

Also, the general size and shape of the store can’t be altered, because it’s part of the company’s brand, Nesse said.

“We might be able to do some things like changing ceiling heights, but we can’t change the design very much overall,” Nesse said.

The company also hopes to use lab expertise to estimate the impacts of various uses of skylights, dimness of lights in certain areas, the thickness of insulation, and the size and height of vestibules, Oshinsky said.

“Our goal is looking toward the future,” Oshinsky said. “If companies don’t start working on things like this now, then when we get to 2030 (and the 2030 energy challenge), it will be much harder to meet goals.”

The project will wrap up in August 2013, and construction of the new facility should be finished by then. Home Depot hasn’t yet broken ground on the site and didn’t want to release a date for that because it hasn’t announced it to the local community yet, Holmes said.

“The project’s really about the future,” Holmes said. “We’ve done a lot of feasibility studies before as a company, and we are always interested in finding the best ways of doing things.”

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When it comes to improving freeway traffic flow, sometimes a bigger road really isn’t a better one.

An investigation by the Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium found that projects designed to expand freeway capacity can actually make congestion problems worse – by creating more traffic instead of reducing delays.

Lei Zhang, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Maryland, recently he did for the group over the past several years. In his research, he modeled several scenarios and development plans for freeway construction in a generic city.

He started the work for OTREC when he was an assistant professor at Oregon State University.

The models looked at congestion, societal impacts of projects, new building development, evolution of road trips and land-use responses to freeway development, among other things. Zhang used it to compare what would happen if transportation planners decided to stop building new freeway capacity versus continuing with the status quo.

“In simple terms what we found is if you build more you just get more people using the freeway,” Zhang said. “In the short term it helps, but then you get more development, more residential and more people using that and you get new bottlenecks.”

In the model, scenarios where freeway money was diverted to other projects – such as mass transit, improving arterial neighborhood streets and bumping up investment for bridge maintenance – worked more effectively than those that simply built new capacity, he said.

“In the generic model we found that the no-new-freeway policy was more efficient, and we didn’t expect that,” Zhang said, adding that efficiency equates to faster travel speeds, fewer delays and less congestion. “The results on the test city show that not investing in freeway capacity is good for both mobility and sustainability.”

In general, over the first 20 years of the no-new-freeway plan, the study found a 15 percent to 20 percent reduction in travel delays from congestion.

“We were surprised by several of the findings,” Zhang said.

On the other hand, continuing to build out capacity as a means of dealing with bottlenecks turned into a sort of money pit, with project costs continuing to rise until they became too expensive to fund, he said of the model.

“It gets into a vicious cycle,” Zhang said.

Without new freeways, development in the generic city spread through several areas and the travel patterns became more balanced.

“You end up with more use of side streets,” Zhang said. “With corridors, they always end up limiting growth – the more money you put in, the more expensive it gets and you have diminishing returns.”

The model also investigated the impact of private-sector versus public-sector road development.

“We found that private-sector investments improved things, but only marginally,” Zhang said. “You have to regulate them to make sure it works the right way, but overall it can be a good thing.”

Justin Carinci, a spokesman for OTREC, said the research could be useful to planners in Oregon as they decide how to distribute limited highway funds.

“In the Oregon Legislature you have to look at congestion pricing; you have to look at tolling and find what’s most efficient for the Portland-metro region,” Carinci said. “The best private-sector scenarios regulated companies to 18 percent return on investment, which seems to be a realistic idea.”

The study was paid for via matching $44,000 grants – one from OTREC and one from OSU. Now that he’s in Maryland, Zhang intends to continue his work by tweaking the model to look at scenarios in real cities, including Portland, he said.

“Portland is widely acclaimed as one of the better planned cities in the United States, and I think it would be fascinating to examine,” Zhang said.

OTREC and Oregon planners likely will continue to follow Zhang’s work with interest, Carinci added.

“Even in the midst of a recession here, nobody has stopped looking 10 or 20 years out at the growth in the Portland area,” Carinci said. “We’re looking at more people (and) more trips, and we’re very interested in figuring out how to accommodate that.”

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A study by the group behind the project will examine an underwater noise reduction technique called “bubble curtains” as a way to reduce the acoustic impacts to homes and wildlife during construction of the bridge.

The group awarded of Tacoma the $811,204 contract for the study, which is expected to be finished by Feb. 28.

The bubble curtain technique releases bubbles of air beneath the water, usually at a low spot near a river bottom. The bubbles act as a curtain that limits the spread of shock or sound waves – such as those caused by pile driving for the bridge.

The company will install six temporary test piles to study the technique over a three-week span. It will monitor sounds from the experiments underwater, in downtown Vancouver, Wash., and on Hayden Island.

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The same tools a meteorologist uses to predict weather could do the same for wind around Northwest turbines.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., since November has used storm-monitoring equipment to track wind patterns at the Stateline Wind Energy Center near Touchet, Wash. The center in the past has relied on computer models of the atmosphere to determine monthly wind conditions. But according to Larry Berg, a scientist with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, those models aren’t always accurate.

“The computer models generally evaluate wind at 10 meters above the ground and temperature at two meters above ground,” Berg said. “You get an answer, but you’re still not sure how the wind is working 100 meters above ground where the blades are. What we’re interested in is the speed of the wind at the top.”

At a radar weather station 19 miles south of the Stateline center, National Weather Service meteorologic equipment is tracking weather conditions 350 feet in the air. Short pulses of radio waves emitted from the station bounce back when they encounter water droplets or other air particles at the wind farm. Computers analyze the returned signals to see how wind conditions vary around the turbines.

An old radio tower at the Stateline site has been outfitted with six tiny microphones that measure time required for sound to travel from one microphone to another, determining speed and wind direction. The data collected over the next nine months will give the national lab an accurate, multi-season profile of wind conditions at the site, Berg said.

In the past, Berg said, computer models used at the site have misjudged the timing and severity of wind conditions. Too much wind forces grid operators to quickly divert or turn off other power sources to accommodate the energy. Too little wind means power must be purchased elsewhere at a moment’s notice, Berg said.

“You typically do wind power forecasts a day ahead or an hour ahead of time,” Berg said. “If those aren’t accurate, the utility has to buy power somewhere else or modify (its) operations. We want to improve forecasting methods so it’s easier and cheaper for a balancing authority to integrate that onto the grid.”

For companies that rely on predicting wind as part of their business, the national lab’s research is particularly exciting. Seattle-based 3TIER provides long-term wind forecasts to wind developers to help them determine the best locations for projects, according to Scott Eichelberger, 3TIER’s director of advanced applications.

While many wind companies have access to technology similar to that used by the national lab, data often is kept private. PNNL’s results will be available online for all to see, allowing 3TIER to combine its computer-modeled wind data with observational information from the Stateline site.

“Computer models will always have errors,” Eichelberger said. “With on-site data, we can go through and adjust our models to better match that observational data and create a corrected long-term data set.”

The national lab recently began crunching its first set of numbers from November, Berg said. So far, the methods appear to be working, but researchers will need several months before they can compare the high-flying wind conditions to those predicted by computer models. The study, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, is expected to wrap up in July 2011.

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Portland’s regional government Metro has received a $2 million grant from the Federal Transit Administration for a transportation study.

The grant will be used for a transit corridor study along Barbur Boulevard in Southwest Portland, according to Karen Kane, spokeswoman for Metro. Identified as one of the region’s next major transit corridors, the study will explore the best way to implement bus-rapid transit, streetcar, light rail or other transportation to reduce the number of cars on Barbur Boulevard.

The 17-mile-long corridor runs along Interstate 5 and State Roud 99-W between downtown Portland and Sherwood, Kane said.  Potential improvements for non-vehicle trips, such as improved sidewalks and bike paths, will also be explored during the study.

The FTA awarded a total of $25.7 million in grants in 16 states for studies to evaluate the best way to place new or expanded transit systems in communities.

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A new approach to monitoring landslides could save local agencies time and money – and protect the public in the process, if a study at Oregon State University pans out.

Aerial scans of terrain are a good starting place for agencies to keep track of landslides and other dangerous road hazards – but those scans are expensive and impractical for continued monitoring on a month-by-month or quarter-by-quarter basis, said Michael Olsen, an assistant professor for OSU‘s School of Civil and Construction Engineering.

And that’s where land-based scans could be beneficial, he said.

Olsen is studying the combined use of aerial and land scans as a way to keep an eye on dangerous landslide sites and deal with problems proactively, rather than cleaning up problems after they occur, he said.

“Right now, we typically find out about landslides a day or two after they happen,” Olsen said. “But with portable units we can scan and process an area, then rescan it a few months later and determine how much slipping is going on.”

The study, funded by the Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium, will look at how land and aerial scans can be used together to improve monitoring.

For aerial work, the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries since 2007 has used a new three-dimensional technology called Light Detection and Ranging, or LIDAR, to scan hazard sites across the state.

So far, it has scanned about 20 percent of the state – in areas that include 90 percent of the population – while using about $9 million in funding.

But it’s not practical to scan an area more than once every few years because of high costs and time-consuming planning, Olsen said.

However, experts can use data from those aerial scans to pare down which sites to monitor, and then bring portable LIDAR units to those sites every few months to see if they are becoming increasingly unstable, Olsen said.

“One advantage is that you don’t need to collect all those ground-based scans at high resolution,” Olsen said. “You can compare the sites with low-resolution scans and then perform high-resolution scans if something has changed.”

The ground units can perform low-resolution scans of an area in a few minutes, whereas high-resolution scans can require 30 to 60 minutes and generate a huge amount of data that takes even longer to process, he added.

Also, there’s a significant scale difference between what is detected via a ground LIDAR scan and an airborne LIDAR scan, said Ian Madin, chief scientist with the geology department.

Ground-based LIDAR provides data at an extremely local scale, looking at areas that are perhaps 1,000 square feet. Airborne LIDAR looks at zones closer to 1,000 square miles, he said.

“The terrestrial data really drills down to the local scale,” Madin said. “But it’s not practical on a larger scale.”

Using the two types of units together seems like a natural fit – and so far, no agencies are doing that in this way, Olsen said.

“It’s a real time-saver,” he said.

Another advantage of using both systems is that airborne LIDAR has problems capturing data from sites around vertical cliffs, which are common along the coastline. Ground units can improve data collection in those areas and protect highways better, Olsen said.

“Airborne can cover more ground, but you have to plan it out months in advance and it’s not best for everything,” he said.

The Oregon Department of Transportation, which is part of OTREC, the group that funded the study, already has a scanner for this sort of field work. But it hasn’t been used much for data collection so far, Olsen added.

A part of his study will help work out methods to make the scanner easier to use so the agency can monitor sites more closely, he said.

“We’re looking at ways of optimizing field survey efforts so we can find ways to best collect data on site,” Olsen said. “It’s always easier when you’re there in the field. You can see changes happening.”

LIDAR technology is slowly coming down in price. Right now airborne units cost about $1 million, and land units cost between $100,000 and $200,000. Software costs from $10,000 to $20,000, he said.

But those prices could decrease significantly over the next decade, which would make it easier for agencies to purchase and use more of the scanners to protect the public and shore up sites before they become dangerous.

“Right now there’s just not enough data to do that everywhere,” Olsen said. “But we’re hoping we can use this eventually to monitor hot spots so we can do something quickly and proactively – before a landslide actually happens.”

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