SUMMARY
Physical Plant Craft Association
Fall Conference
November 7th and 8th, 2002
The 2002 PPCA fall conference at
Scott Goodwin the PPCA founding father started out the conference with a warm welcome, and everyone was immediately encouraged to get with a counterpart from another university and begin sharing ideas. In keeping with tradition everyone was given the opportunity to introduce themselves and make it easier for attendies to find their counterpart. As part of the morning session Bonnie Crippen, current PPCA president, bid farewell to Charlene Badger and congratulated her for the marvelous job she has done as the PPCA secretary/treasurer. One of the highlights from the morning session was the short introduction film put on by Chris Olsen briefly detailing the Facilities dept here at USU.
All of the training and information sessions were presented by experienced shop personnel who were knowledgeable in their profession. Topics were discussed in an open and learning atmosphere maximizing the opportunity to share from personal experience. Some of the sessions included mini campus tours focusing on the topic such as emergency generators, water quality, and elevators. This provided a hands-on approach that helped attendees get the most out of the session. The most popular training/information session turned out to be the one on “The Estimating process” by Dave Petersen, major projects specialist. During his presentation he focused on the following points.
Tours of the campus were given on the second day. These included the Cogen plant and utility tunnels, Power generation plant, and Landscape restoration over new utility tunnels.
Overall everyone seemed to agree that it was a great conference. As things were wrapping up and everyone was preparing to leave the atmosphere seemed to be charged with an upbeat attitude. The conference proved to be motivational, informative, and enlightening not only for the many attendees from other campuses, but especially for the personnel that work at the Facilities department here at USU.
A special thanks goes out to the following vendors that helped offset some of the conference costs.