The elections for 2013 are complete and the results are in. I am extremely honored to have been selected both to serve on the board again and also to serve as president of the association for the upcoming 2013-14 year. The complete results are detailed below. I want to welcome our new directors and thank all of the board members and officers for volunteering to serve this year.
2013-14 PSSRA Directors (Officers)
MSR Member:
- Gene Kegley, Vigor Shipyards
- Greg Bryant, PacShip (Secretary)
- Richard Coleman, Newport News Shipbuilding
- Jeff Brooks, NASSCO – Earl Industries
ABR Member:
- Neil Turney, Puglia Engineering
- Mark Kipps, AMSEC (President)
- David Jack, QED Systems
Associate Member:
- Ed Zajonc, Olympic Services
- Jim Taylor, Epsilon (Chairman)
- Carla Newell, National Specialty Alloys (Vice President)
- Phil Parsons, Certified Coatings (Treasurer)
I also want to thank our outgoing president, Dave Jack, for all of his hard work and dedication over the past two years. As Dave detailed in his farewell message, our organization is strong and there are many good things happening. But he also stated that the ship repair industry faces some real challenges this year and beyond. We are staring down workload valleys which will make it difficult for our industry to make the productivity, safety and quality gains that we would like to achieve. The difficult task of retaining skilled workers and attracting new employees to our industry is made much harder under the volatile demand signal that is forecasted in navy repair work.
Our focus this year will be to work with the navy to identify work for the private sector in two programs that have not historically involved the Puget Sound industrial base. These programs are the ship inactivation/recycling program and the submarine program. The navy is forecasting large workloads in these programs starting in the next few years and continuing for quite some time. The planned arrival of the ex-CVN 65 in 2017 will create a big workload challenge for the naval shipyard. Code 400 is already talking to us about setting up meetings between our board and program mangers from these programs. We are also in discussions with the navy about an industry day focused on the recycling program where navy and industry people could discuss needs and capabilities and have an open dialog about the program and how industry capabilities could help.
We are starting our year with a great guest speaker and a real friend to PSSRA. I know that many of you remember Rear Admiral Mark Whitney from his time as the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard commander. He is now the head of NAVSEA 04 and will speak at our association at a luncheon on December 5th. We have moved the November meeting to this date to accommodate Mark’s travel schedule and you should have already received a head’s up on this.
I look forward to an outstanding year for our association. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have ideas, questions or concerns.
Mark Kipps
