Fall = football, and around the country people are cheering on their favorite teams! From your kiddo’s pee-wee games to Friday night lights, weekends dedicated to your alma mater or favorite pro team, football is in full swing. And with each game, anticipation builds to find out who is the “Best.”

Every infrastructure project relies on Environmental assessments to ensure that cultural and natural resources are preserved, and all regulatory compliance measures are met. Your environmental consultant helps you check those boxes, but do you actually know what it takes to get the job done?

My wife is a PGA Golf Professional.  She’s also an adjunct distance-learning teacher at The Yost Household Kindergarten and Middle School for our 6 and 13-year-old’s, but that’s a story to be shared with other parents in the same boat…over one (or three) glasses of wine.   Her career as a golf professional is slightly different from that of the golf pro that runs a country club, who sets up tournaments, merchandises, and schmoozes members.  She chose long ago that her passion was to provide solutions to help golfers become better golfers.  She’s a golf instructor, a golf driving range owner, and the golf coach for the men’s and women’s teams at Fairmont State University in West Virginia, a small Division II school.

Through this strange year of 2020, puzzles seem to have made a serious comeback.  One strategy to complete: identify the outside pieces and build the framework, then fill in the rest.  The outside pieces are the easiest to find and put together.  But you don’t get the full image until you fill in the complicated middle pieces.  What good is a puzzle with just the framework?

I spent a good part of my childhood growing up on a farm in West Virginia, both on our farm and my grandparents’ farms.  We had friends down the road who had a small herd of Guernsey cattle that they would milk, by hand, twice a day (this was the late 50’s and early 60’s).  Milking was quite an interesting process for the outsider (me) to watch as, in this case, the farmer, his older children, and a helper worked diligently to milk all the cattle as quickly as possible.  Cattle were brought into the barn, milked, and then lead out like clockwork.  One of the simplest (but essential) tools used in the milking process was a three-legged stool. 

We all know that just about anything can change in an election cycle year. From policy and funding to who’s sitting on the bench and who’s railing on the house floor. Really the only safe bet we can make is that about half of everything we know at this time will change. The same is true for the rules and regulations that drive environmental consulting.

Integrated vs. À La Carte Land Services - 

When you plan a multi-phase project, do you take the integrated or à la carte approach to your land services?  No phase or stage of a project is an island unto itself.  Many stages of a project build on the deliverables created and provided in earlier stages.  Each is mutually supporting as they are elements of a larger and more complex goal – the successful completion of the project.  So why not allow a single land company to manage each of those stages?

The "do loop".