ACEC President and CEO, Linda Bauer Darr, Responds to the Coronavirus
The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to have a global impact affecting travel, commerce, and daily life. The safety and well-being of our team, our members, and the engineering industry as a whole are foremost in our minds.
ACEC is actively monitoring this rapidly developing situation across our departments. We are taking steps not only to serve as a resource for news and information, but also to collect information about how the coronavirus is impacting your business in order to share best practices and effectively advocate for your needs.
We are in the process of developing a member survey to glean insights into industry impacts, best practices, and trends related to your response to managing your business challenges related to the virus. We will offer webinars to share the results and provide useful information to help firm owners and their employees respond to disruptions brought on by the coronavirus. We will also be ramping up our communication with you through our blog, The Last Word, which will contain up-to-date information from our communications, business resources and education, member services, and advocacy departments. Finally, we will be coordinating weekly calls of groups like ours in the built environment to learn from one another and collaborate on solutions having to do with impacts on business from the coronavirus. We will share relevant insights gained from that process and work together on common advocacy goals that support the AEC community as a whole.
Like many of you, we have weighed alternatives for staffing our office as we watch the progression of the virus. We will move to a remote work schedule next week, which will last as long as we deem necessary to keep our team safe. Our normal office hours will remain in place and our staff will be completely available to you throughout this period.
Regarding our annual Convention and Legislative Summit in April, we are monitoring the situation in Washington, D.C., closely and are following the recommendations of the CDC, the D.C. Department of Health, and related federal and municipal agencies on how to proceed. We are exploring options to postpone or scale back the event, and we are in active communication with the host hotel to ensure they are taking all precautions for the safety of our members should we choose to proceed. The leadership at ACEC National has a call scheduled with the ACEC National Executive Committee on March 19th to discuss alternatives for proceeding with the event. Any decisions made during that call will be communicated to you as soon as possible.
Until then, we recommend that you stay tuned to the ACEC website (www.acec.org) and ACEC’s Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook pages for up-to-date information.
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