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They need guys like this on east coast


June 2, 2007

C. C. Myers, a 6-foot-5 contractor who favors peacock cowboy boots, rebuilt a California freeway ramp in 17 days, earning a $5 million bonus.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/us...hp&oref=slogin
A Miracle-Worker Highway Man Rides the Bonus Train

By CAROL POGASH
SAN FRANCISCO, June 1 — Bay Area residents are used to growing old waiting for new roads. Construction of the new Bay Bridge has become a generational event: 13 years to plan and an estimated 11 to build. So after a gasoline tanker truck crashed in April, burning a busy ramp in Oakland that linked parts of the East Bay to San Francisco, drivers grumbled and took to surface streets, convinced their slow-motion commutes would last months.


But the company owned by C. C. Myers, a 6-foot-5 contractor who favors peacock cowboy boots, fixed the mangled freeway so fast that some residents have recalibrated their respect for the California Department of Transportation, which hired him.


The state estimated that repairs to the 165-foot-long ramp between Interstates 80 and 580 would take 50 days and cost $5.2 million. For every day short of the June 26 deadline, it promised a $200,000 bonus, not to exceed a total of $5 million. The highest bid came in at $6.4 million. Mr. Myers’s company, C. C. Myers Inc., won with the lowest bid — $867,075 — and completed the project in 17 days, winning the full $5 million.
“This ain’t no $800,000 project,” Mr. Myers said in an interview, adding that he hoped to realize a $2.5 million profit.


“It was a monumental accomplishment,” said Jennifer Gavin of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. “But it’s the way we’re doing business these days.”


Incentives were also used in rebuilding Interstate 40 over the Arkansas River in Oklahoma after a barge hit it and Interstate 15 in Salt Lake City for the 2002 Winter Olympics. The trend, Ms. Gavin said, is to “deliver quality but at ever faster speed because the public needs it.”


In 1994, after the Northridge earthquake in Southern California, C. C. Myers repaired two bridges 74 days ahead of the state’s deadline, earning a $14.8 million bonus.


Incentives, though, can be risky. “When government excessively prioritizes its schedule, you can end up accepting quality below that which should have been insisted upon,” warned Frederick Salvucci, who as head of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation pushed for the Big Dig in Boston, which turned into the problem-plagued and most costly highway project in the nation.


The Oakland project, Ms. Gavin said, was an example of a successful government-private collaboration. Within 24 hours of the devastating crash and fire, the federal government approved some emergency reconstruction money; not long after, the state settled on a design plan.


Carl Douglas, the president of a steel fabricator in Coolidge, Ariz., who had access to steel from Pennsylvania and Texas, learned of the business opportunity and contacted several contractors. Two and a half hours before the bids were due, he first talked to Mr. Myers. The contractor promised to share 25 percent of the profits with Mr. Douglas’s company, Stinger Welding, and a deal was struck.


A few hours later, the bids were opened, and C. C. Myers Inc. was the winner. Local lore has it that within 15 minutes of signing the contracts, Mr. Myers had workers and equipment on the scene. He insists that is not true. They were there 15 minutes before the signing, he said.


Shop drawings were approved in hours, not months, and state inspectors were flown to Stinger Welding to oversee quality control. Mr. Douglas, who kept his shop running 20 hours a day, put two drivers in each truck so one could sleep while the other drove the steel girders to California. Rather than wait until all 12 girders arrived, Mr. Myers’s crews formed the deck in parts, pouring the concrete soon after the last girders were delivered. From the start, Mr. Myers said, his crews worked 12-hour shifts around the clock.
Will Kempton, the director of the California Department of Transportation, called Mr. Myers “a unique character” who “represents the best in the industry.”


A spokesman for the State Division of Occupational Safety and Health, Dean Fryer, said that in the last 17 years, C. C. Myers Inc. had suffered only two fatalities, which he called “not unusual” for a “hazardous industry.”


Mr. Myers, who said he quit school in 10th grade and passed only one carpentry test — because a sympathetic proctor fed him the answers — started his career overseeing highway projects for a large contractor, always coming in under budget. After his supervisors were given “skimpy bonuses,” he quit and started his own company.


Today, he said, he employs 300 to 400 people and has annual revenues of $150 million to $170 million.


The company’s chief financial officer, Linda Clifford, said Mr. Myers hired people with an entrepreneurial spirit, and was quick to credit his success to his workers. Everyone shares in 35 percent of the amount below the anticipated cost of a job.


Mr. Myers said he made one misstep in the ramp project: telling a TV reporter it would be completed before Memorial Day weekend. It was, but Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had wanted to make that promise public himself. “I’m not going to play games with him,” Mr. Myers said.
The governor praised Mr. Myers at a news conference, but did not introduce him until reporters began asking questions: all for Mr. Myers.
That made him especially glad he had worn those peacock cowboy boots. “I wanted to be a lot taller than him that day,” he said.

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They need guys like this on east coast

Anybody know where C.C. Meyer was born and bred? Honestly, he doesn't look like a Californian... more like a transplant from Jersey.