November, 2008

ALZA M1 Decommissioning Completed

For many years, ALZA Corporation, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, has operated a huge pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in Mountain View in a building it calls M1. When the company chose to move out of this building a massive project was required to decontaminate the building and to safely remove all the manufacturing equipment and support systems.

Superintendent Don Haynes, Project Manager Kim Tanguay, and Foreman Vince Cuen developed an aggressive but systematic plan to decontaminate ductwork and piping, safe off all utilities, remove major pieces of equipment, remove utility lines and make the abandoned space ready for sale. This process took several months and involved dozens of craftspeople.

RMC Patient Wing Underway

After a long wait between phases in this huge hospital expansion project, our team began excavating and placing foundations for the new patient wing at the Regional Medical Center of San Jose.

Steve Warr, Colleen Ciucci and Jason Castillo are running this critical project. Our scope on this project is unusual - we are acting as a subcontractor in charge of the concrete formwork, reinforcing steel, concrete placement and finishing. As such we must coordinate with other subcontractors, such as electrical and plumbing, but must do so via the general contractor. This gives us a pretty clear idea of what our subcontractors have to do to be successful and it will doubtless improve our performance as a GC.

The project will run from October, 2008 through June, 2009.

Recession Strategy

We are in an industry which typically suffers deeply when the economy gets sluggish, and everyone knows the current downturn has been severe. Still, the Silicon Valley commercial construction market is doing better than most of the rest of the country. Nonetheless, we fully expect things to get worse, possibly much worse, before the inevitable recovery.

Our strategy to survive and thrive is simple:

• Maintain our core strength, our excellent teammates.
• Over-service our core clients
• Reduce overhead
• Prepare for the recovery

We have built an outstanding team of professionals and will keep this team engaged, even through slow periods, with any projects we can do for our favorite clients. If this means overstaffing those projects at our expense, the upside - an amazing success story on every project - makes this worth doing.

Overhead reduction is not rocket science. But maneuvering the company to be in a strong position when the economy comes back to life - that is going to take some smart moves. These include recruiting and developing staff in our areas of specialization. To this end we are actively interviewing great builders who are well versed in our core markets and building our training program to increase our expertise across the board.

We have seen recessions before, they are like forest fires: Painful to live through, but in the end they prepare the ground for new growth and the strongest trees survive.

Best Year Ever

Speaking of strong trees, Meade Construction Group, Inc. grew impressively in 2008. As we close our books on a year where we exceeded $50 million in volume, we are quite pleased. This volume, representing 67% growth over 2007, was accomplished by the same staff we have maintained for the past two years. We worked hard, but we also worked smarter, using productive systems and the synergies of teamwork.

Well done.

Tyco Projects

We have completed several projects for Tyco Thermal Controls in Menlo Park this year. These include a new loading dock, roof replacement, creation of a high-bay manufacturing and material handling area and a new server room, to name a few.

The team of Don Buckmaster, Steve Warr, Pablo Reynoso, Eddie Parenti, Amanda Campbell and Tim Tempel has handled this large volume of critical projects smoothly, completing several simultaneously and maintaining operations in other parts of this huge facility uninterrupted.