Snorgy…
Years ago I was a principal in a small civil engineering firm that did mostly municipal infrastructure design and serving as contract city engineers and special district engineers. We joint-ventured with an out-of-state firm (at their request) to do civil engineering for one of their major commercial development clients. They had no experience or, initially, licenses in our state and thought it would be best to team with a local firm rather than try to get up-to-speed all on their own. The three principals from each firm became the six principals for the JV. They transferred a couple of their employees to our location and we loaned a couple of our employees to get things started and then we hired locally as needed, eventually reaching about 25 people. I had no day-to-day role in managing the JV (one principal from each firm handled that), but I did get involved on a regular basis doing QC reviews and providing technical assistance to the JV's design teams (in my experience, most land development engineers are not very technically adept, so my help was sorely needed at times). I also chewed out one of the JV's senior engineers for blaming (publicly and loudly) my lead surveyor for a problem that was 100% his own. I found out it was not the first time this had happened and I would have fired him on the spot if I had had the jurisdiction.
Back to the issue at hand — The commercial development client required that all drawings be stamped and signed by the lead principal from the other firm, which made sense because they were his client for many years before the JV. However, that principal's normal schedule was one week in his home office, one week in our office, and one week traveling to project sites and visiting with local agencies. As you can imagine, this made timely stamping and signing of drawings to meet project schedules a real problem.
One day, about three or four years into the JV, one of the drafters for the JV asked me for a private conversation. He was concerned about their process for stamping and signing drawings, but he didn't know the regulations and wanted my advice. He told me that one of the engineering technicians (the first "designer" transferred out by the other firm) had engineering stamps for every state the other firm's lead principal was registered in (including ours) and a drawer full of sticky-backs with his signature. So, when the lead principal wasn't in our office, she could get the drawings "stamped and signed" and sent out just based on a phone call from him. The drafter wanted to know if that was OK. I told him "H*LL NO" and that it was illegal in all jurisdictions for a non-engineer to wield an engineer's stamp, not just our state, and signatures weren't legit because they weren't original. He told me that it hadn't always been that way, only the last year-and-a-half or so. They had devised this procedure to save a couple days on the back-and-forth required for FedEx, a final review, etc.
Based on my past dealings with the other firm's principals, which had started out good but were heading downhill, I decided that a grand gesture would be more effective than a typical protest. I told the drafter to wait until the designer went home for evening and to bring me the engineering stamps, the stamp pad, and all the sticky-backs he could find and that I would lock them in a drawer and wait for the SH*T to hit the fan.
About a week later, the SH*T hit the fan. The designer was frantically scurrying around the office looking for the stamps and sticky-backs and was having no luck. A couple hours into her scurrying, she decided to check on our side of the office since she had had no luck on her side. When she asked me if I had seen the stamps and sticky-backs, I said, "Yes, they're in my locked drawer and that's where they are going to stay." I then explained to her that what she and the lead principal were doing was illegal, that I hadn't worked so hard for my license to see it rendered meaningless by their procedure, yada, yada, yada. Her response was, "But, we have a deadline." I told her she was going to miss her deadline. In less than 30 minutes I was on the phone with the lead principal, who was even more furious, but I told him the same story. I also told him that he and designer didn't cease and desist, I would turn him, her, and the JV firm into the state for disciplinary action. Since the JV firm was a cash cow, this threat stopped him cold. The problem was fixed to my satisfaction and I did spot checks to make sure there were no lapses.
However, this was just one of the many problems with the JV that caused me to sell my interest in both firms and move on to other opportunities.
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"Is it the only lesson of history that mankind is unteachable?"
--Winston S. Churchill
