XD's Corner

I hope everyone had a great summer; for me, it went by too fast. While many Posts take some time off during the summer, your national headquarters was as busy as ever working for our members. Let me highlight how we spent the summer.

Summer Camps. Each year, SAME HQ provides support to the Engineering and Construction Camps—the U.S. Navy Seabees camp at Port Hueneme, Calif.; the U.S. Air Force Academy camp (USAFA) in Colorado Springs, Colo.; and the U.S. Army camp in Vicksburg, Miss. We have a passion for these camps and the positive feedback we get from parents, students, mentors, and squad and flight leaders tells us our passion is paying off. We operate as a team—SAME HQ, local Posts, Sustaining Member companies, the military installation and others—to further improve the camps and strengthen our goal of inspiring high school students to become architects or engineers and to consider applying to a service academy or ROTC program. A new committee, chaired by Col. Ronald B. Brown, USA (Ret.), Sundt Construction, has been established to oversee the camps. This year, we had two great head mentors: Col. Kurt Ubbelohde, USA (Ret.), Leo Daly, at the USAFA Camp; and Capt. Roger Frauenfelder, P.E., USN (Ret.), at the Seabee Camp. We also had two great camp Officers-in-Charge: Maj. Hugh Cronin, USA, at the USAFA camp; and Lt. April Lemons, USN, at the Seabees Camp. Please give these outstanding SAME leaders and the many other volunteers involved with the camps your thanks when you see them.

The dates for next year’s camps are listed on the camp Web site at www.same.org/camps. We encourage Posts to use their Education and Mentoring Funds to sponsor a high school student and a Young Member mentor to a camp. We had 57 Posts participate in this year’s camps—an all time high—but we want more Posts to participate in this worthwhile endeavor.

Design-Build Workshops. Since March 2007, SAME national has conducted six workshops (Norfolk, Va.; San Antonio, Texas; Oklahoma City, Okla.,; Los Angeles, Calif.; and Baltimore, Md.), with our final workshop of 2007 slated for Dec. 10-12 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The purpose of the workshop is to facilitate discussions and understanding between Department of Defense (DOD) construction agencies, installations and the private sector on a delivery method that has been announced by DOD as the “default” delivery method for military construction projects. The workshops have been extremely successful in serving that purpose, with more than 170 attendees and approximately a 40/60 split between DOD and industry. SAME Posts that want SAME to conduct a workshop at their location may contact SAME Continuing Education Manager Kristin Duckworth at kduckworth@same.org for more details. The primary criterion for agreeing to host a workshop is a commitment from government agencies to send their key engineers, project managers and contracting personnel.

AMS. After a substantial contractor delay, we finally launched the Sustaining Member portion of SAME’s new Association Management System (AMS) just after Labor Day. With this launch, we are now able to begin testing Post Leaders’ access. SAME HQ staff has spent many hours working with the AMS contractor to ensure that the system meets our requirements, and testing each successive version of the software. We are very happy with the new system and will be testing its full capabilities over the coming months. As you may recall, The Individual Member portion of the AMS was launched in January, with the renewal of all individual memberships, and is working well. We are very optimistic about the future of our AMS and its contribution to SAME’s membership and programs.

Conferences and Workshops. We had an amazing and challenging summer by hosting the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Infrastructure Systems Conference (ISC) in late June, the Post Leaders Workshop in August and the Facilities Management (FM) Workshop in early September. The SAME HQ conference planning team—headed by SAME Conference and Meeting Manager Diane Schreiber—has established an outstanding reputation for planning and conducting conferences, paying attention to every detail and providing excellent customer service. ISC was attended by more than 1,000 people and included 12 technical tracks that featured more than 400 speakers. USACE considered it a great success.

The FM Workshop was attended by 115 people and may be an annual event in partnership with the International Facilities Management Association and the Federal Facilities Council. Congratulations to the SAME FM Committee, chaired by Gene Hubbard, P.E., NOAA, and the SAME HQ and IFMA teams for making the workshop a success.

Post Leaders Workshop. More than 40 Post, national and regional leaders, including SAME President Gen. Eulberg, attended the Post Leaders Workshop and gave it high marks for its content and the sense of family that permeated the room. In summary, your national headquarters continues to work to make a positive difference for the military engineer community, our Posts and our members. We love what we do and we enjoy serving you.

Bob Wolff, Ph.D., P.E., F.SAME
SAME Executive Director