Good News is Worth Sharing

This year, Tom Murray, area operations manager who led the construction of the Sterling Natural Resource Center (SNRC), sat on a panel at the 2024 Design-Build Conference and Expo in Dallas, Texas, discussing how a progressive design-build delivery model was used on the project.

After celebrating substantial completion on the project in San Bernardino, California, earlier this year with the East Valley Water District (EVWD), Tom was excited to share how the team successfully delivered this vital community project during the session titled “Revolutionizing Community Infrastructure: Delivering Triple-Bottom-Line Success Through Design-Build Innovation and Sterling Collaboration,” part of the Design Build Institute of America’s (DBIA) annual conference.

Tom sat alongside Michael Moore, general manager and CEO of EVWD; Peter Tymkiw, design manager at Arcadis; and Ash Dhingra, program manager at AKD consulting. Together, they shared the story of SNRC, discussing everything from the project’s vision to what it took to bring the project to life.  

The group took a deep dive into leveraging “triple-bottom line,” a philosophy that looks at every decision with three top priorities:

1. Profit: the flexibility of the progressive design-build model allowed the team to address design and procurement challenges such as supply chain pressures and schedule crunches
2. People: the team kept the local community top of mind, seeking community engagement and feedback whenever possible and prioritizing DBE contracts, creating economic opportunities for local businesses
3. Planet: the team adopted EVWD’s philosophy that every source is a resource – committing to utilize every resource at their disposal by recycling and reusing, ultimately leading to net-zero energy consumption

They explained that keeping these three priorities top of mind helped the team stay aligned and allowed for more collaboration, which improved efficiency and led to a higher quality project. 

“I was happy with how the panel came together to show how our collaborative team achieved this great success,” Tom says. “Our presentation was an opportunity to showcase how we executed progressive design-build effectively.