Welcome to toledo!

Letter from the President

ASCE National has three strategic initiatives to guide the work of civil engineers. The Infrastructure Initiative asks civil engineers to propose practical solutions to maintain and modernize our nation’s deteriorating infrastructure.  ASCE has evaluated the condition of the nation’s public infrastructure and given it a grade of D+, and estimated that $3.6 Trillion should be invested by 2020, approximately double the current rate of investment.  

ASCE’s Failure to Act economic studies show the impact on America’s economy if we continue only at current infrastructure investment levels. This infrastructure is absolutely necessary for the American economy to operate and these economic studies show large dividends from increased investment in infrastructure.  We all know that is much less expensive to maintain infrastructure properly than it is to replace that infrastructure after it falls apart, but there seems to be no willingness to make the necessary investments.  We have seen bridges collapse, seen our roads fall apart, seen our sewers collapse, seen water lines explode and experienced power failures, yet little gets done.

Those civil engineers responsible for maintaining our nation’s infrastructure know that we are not investing nearly what we should, especially at the local level and it is very obvious that things will likely get worse before it gets better. Recently on Sixty Minutes, ASCE Past President, Andy Hermann took viewers on a tour of Pittsburg’s bridges by helicopter.   One of the bridges shown was a bridge built under an overpass to protect motorists from falling concrete from the bridge above.  Clearly that shows that we are wasting money on stop-gap measures. Many countries are spending more than twice as much on their infrastructure as a percentage of their GDP and the results are evident.  We are not being fiscally responsible, we will not be economically competitive and future generations will be faced with huge costs to replace the failed infrastructure.

The second strategic initiative is - Raise the Bar, ASCE is advocating that we increase education requirements for licensure to better protect the public in the future, and they recommend that future Professional Engineers should be required to have either a Master’s Degree or at least 30 hours of post graduate study. Currently engineers with those qualifications can become Board Certified Professional Engineers in certain disciplines, much like Board Certified Doctors

The third strategic initiative is - Sustainability, where ASCE recommends that we embrace and encourage civil engineers’ role as contributors to a sustainable world. ASCE has adopted sustainability policies for specific practices such as flood control, disaster mitigation, energy, environment, governance and several others.

All three initiatives will take considerable effort from members if anything is to be accomplished. More information on all three strategic initiatives can be found on the ASCE national website, which is linked to the Toledo ASCE website.

Best Regards,

Lindsay Exton

Toledo ASCE President

Current Officers:

President – Lindsay Exton

First Vice President – Steve Lange

Second Vice President – Brock Laurer

Past President – Ron Kolodzaike

Treasurer – Kyle Warner

Secretary - Jordan Kreglow

Webmaster - Jeff Knueve

Program Committee Chair – Gregory Buhoveckey

Continuing Ed. Committee Chair – Adam Hoff

Ohio Council Delegate - Keith Aschemeier

Ohio Council Delegate – Michael Pniewski

Member At Large -  Brian Randolph

Member At Large -  Don Feller

ONU Practitioner Advisor - Lindsay Exton

ONU Practitioner Advisor - Douglas Dariano

UT Practitioner Advisor – Jordan Kreglow

UT Practitioner Advisor – Jeff Knueve

Veterans' Glass City Skyway Bridge

Northwest Ohio made history as the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) opened the Veterans’ Glass City Skyway (VGCS) in June 2007. Below you will find some interesting facts about Toledo's record breaking bridge.

• Single largest project ODOT has undertaken

• World’s first cable-stayed bridge pylon to include glass panels

• State-of-the-art LED pylon lighting capable of 16.7 million color combinations

• First U.S. bridge to have stainless steel sheathing around the stay cables

• 156-strand stay cables are the largest ever for a cable-stayed bridge

• One of the first to use stay cradle system in the pylon.