Communication Is a Tool That Is Not Used Enough W hen engineers fail to communicate effectively, the public may end up paying. According to a newly released independent audit of the Eastside Reservoir Project, the public and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California didn't receive the mistaken impression until much too late that the project's costs remained within budget. For the first half of last year, the project manager, Dennis G. Majors, tried to finds ways to trim and shift costs before finally publicizing the ugly reality of the overrun. Through this audit, we have found it was his responsibility and that only he had the expertise, both personally and collectively, to resolve this problem short of asking for an increased appropriation.
Engineers continue to lose more and more clout in public arenas.
In California, the nation's most populous state, the state's transportation and water resources departments used to be headed by civil engineers, but no longer. Majors is losing some clout, too. Once responsible for making the Eastside Reservoir Project not just a reservoir but Southern California's premier public recreation area, he is being stripped of that recreation role and ordered to focus on the reservoir's construction. For a while, he seemed like the very model of an appropriately communicative engineer. ENR honored Majors last year for the way in which he won over environmentalists to the idea of building the nation's largest earthmoving project, east of Los Angeles.