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  • Writer's pictureChen Moore and Associates

September 4, 2020

Peter Moore, P.E., F.ASCE, ENV SP, LEED AP

President, Chen Moore and Associates

Last week: When is the best time to roll out a new tax? The simple answer to that is never. When is the best time to start planning for sea-level rise? The answer to that is yesterday. The City of Fort Lauderdale began meetings this past week on changes to their stormwater utility fee program that will increase rates for residents and businesses. These dedicated funding sources are critical to provide continuity with these programs and will allow the city to apply for grants requiring matching funds or bond the fees to accelerate progress. These are necessary for our future.

Looking ahead: Sept. 30 is a very important day in Washington D.C. for highways, airports and transit. Both the Payroll Support Program and the current surface transportation bill expire without congressional action. The Payroll Support Program has been keeping 100,000 airline workers and contractors employed while the airline industry is trying to recover. If the surface transportation bill deadline passes, the current law expires which will deplete the Highway Trust Fund. This will have a cascading effect, furloughing federal DOT employees and impacting a wide variety of state projects that get federal reimbursement. We need these reauthorizations to stave off disaster.

  • Writer's pictureChen Moore and Associates

August 28, 2020

Peter Moore, P.E., F.ASCE, ENV SP, LEED AP

President, Chen Moore and Associates

Last week: I previously wrote about this as a concern, and this past week it happened. State Rep. Mike La Rosa, a Republican who faces term limits this year, was named last Friday by Gov. DeSantis to serve on the Florida Public Service Commission. The selection of La Rosa was over two other politicians and engineer Donald Polmann, who was seeking to be re-elected and was previously the only engineer on the commission. The five-member Public Service Commission regulates utilities and is expected to grapple with a series of high-profile issues in the coming years, including complex base-rate cases for electric utilities.

Looking ahead: After watching the destruction caused by Hurricane Laura in Louisiana and Texas this past week, we are looking at another two disturbances in the Caribbean in the coming week. When I was a child, my only knowledge of tropical activity was when storms became named and I used the Public Hurricane map and the latitude and longitude information provided to plot them on the refrigerator. In know that all this information causes stress to some – “not another two storms” – but I congratulate the advancements and warnings that lead to increase preparedness.

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  • Writer's pictureChen Moore and Associates

August 21, 2020

Peter Moore, P.E., F.ASCE, ENV SP, LEED AP

President, Chen Moore and Associates

Last week: This past week, I heard from a lot of people about the quality of both public and private virtual learning as the beginning of the school year kicked off. While most of the conversations ended with a reference to an alcoholic beverage, there were some definite success stories. My own daughter who never previously attended school struggled with PK3 math lessons, but found a connection over music class and story time. A teacher friend found that he was able to migrate to a completely paperless class. I know it isn’t easy, but let’s dwell on the positive for the children.

Looking ahead: This coming week will see two hurricanes simultaneously hit the gulf coast in Florida. In a typical storm response, there is a great deal of coordination between localities that share common risk. Risk prone areas have huge resources in crews, generators, pumps and everything necessary for recovery, but never quite enough to recover individually from a true disaster. For those events, it requires many localities banding together to give the resources of dozens of localities. If storms start coming in twos, threes or more, we’ll need to rethink preparedness and recovery plans. Let’s hope this is an anomaly.

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