News & Moves: June 10, 2008

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Shea Hit by Manure Blast From Past

Steve Nordstrom

Pringle Gets a New CEO

Steve Nordstrom has been hired to join Pringle Development as president and CEO. He has been in home building operations for more than 20 years beginning in 1988 at Jim Walter Homes. He is also a qualified residential contractor in South Carolina, North Carolina, West Virginia, Louisiana and Florida.

Nate Kredich

New Vice President Takes Reins at USGBC

Nate Kredich joined the U.S. Green Building Council in a newly created role of vice president for residential market development, where he will oversee USGBC'S LEED for Homes program.

Richard J. Dalton

Jeb Koury

David Rey

Dale Dubberly

Taylor Morrison Announces New Executive Team

Taylor Morrison has named the executive team that will lead its Northeast Florida Division. The executive team includes Division President Richard J. Dalton, Vice President of Sales and Marketing Jeb Koury, Vice President of Finance David Rey and Vice President of Construction Dale Dubberly. The group is directing the recently merged Taylor Morrison division in Jacksonville, Fla.

Education for Economic Gain?

Rhonda Schaffler from Bloomberg News talked with KB Home founder and former AIG SunAmerica chairman Eli Broad about the need for better education to make the kind of progress other countries such as China, India and Japan have in their workforces and economies (Part 1). In the second part of the interview, Broad discusses why it will take time for the U.S. housing market to turn around. Watch these videos now! Part 1; Part 2.

36 Percent

Total housing starts rose 8.2 percent in April, NAHB reported. This is due to a multifamily unit construction rise of 36 percent. In March, multifamily unit construction fell 35 percent.

Shea Hit by Manure Blast From Past

One excess of the go-go years of the mid-2000s just came back to affront California giant Shea Homes, which recently agreed to pay $100,000 to the Riverside County District Attorney's Office and $200,000 to the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board for an illegal discharge of dairy wastewater containing manure from a Shea development site in San Jacinto, Calif.

Don't brush this off as somebody else's problem until you check your own site work logs. These laws are on the books all across the country. The Shea site had containment ponds holding the dairy wastewater. Under state law, Shea was required to develop and implement a Storm Water Pollution Prevention Plan (SWPPP) with control measures to prevent any discharge of polluted water into local rivers and streams. But on April 25, 2005, a Shea subcontractor demolished the ponds, allowing 108,000 gallons of manure-laden wastewater to enter a storm drain leading to the San Jacinto River. The discharge was exacerbated by an explosion at the site when the contractor struck a pressurized natural gas line.

"It seems almost comical," says Reed Sato, director of the Office of Enforcement for the California Water Resources Control Board. "Shea gave no direction to the contractor as to what should happen to the wastewater once that firm demolished the structures holding it back. It would have been a relatively simple matter to develop a plan for this facility."

Shea declined to comment for this report.

In the midst of the market frenzy in early 2005, Shea missed that direction opportunity. Today, the firm is paying for that mistake, and probably making sure pollution prevention plans are in place for all future conversions of former dairy farms.

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