Despite a late-year jump in activity, especially in home building, 2011 will go down as abysmal for construction in the north state.
The city of Redding suffered its worst year for building since 1981. Factor inflation, and 2011 was arguably the worst year ever in Redding.
“To me, (2011) felt like a year of transition,” said Shasta Builders Exchange board member Don Ajamian of Ajamian Construction. “I think we are all getting used to maybe what is a new normal, in a sense.
“So contractors, myself included, are reducing staff where necessary just to meet workloads, or lack thereof.”
The city reported $38.4 million in building valuation in 2011, a 39 percent decrease from the $62.5 million in valuation in 2010, and a 35 percent drop from 2009′s $58.9 million.
It was the worst year for building since 1981, when the city recorded $34.1 million in valuation.
Valuation numbers in 2011 also were down in Anderson, Shasta Lake and Shasta County.
“I have always felt that through this whole thing (the Great Recession), that the work has not gone away.
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Boulder City officials today signed a 50-year lease agreement with Korean Midland Power Company to develop a 250 to 350 megawatt solar generation facility, the company announced.
The project is expected to create hundreds of jobs during construction.
The solar array will be located in the Eldorado Valley, about 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas.
The project is expected to break ground in mid-2012 and will take about three years to complete.
“We are very pleased to advance into the U.S. market, where huge growth is expected” in the photovoltaic field, company president and CEO Nam In-Suk said in a statement.
KOMIPO will oversee implementation of the overall project, including the financing, operations and maintenance. It
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ALMATY, Kazakhstan — Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has a vision for a Soviet Union-lite he hopes will become a new Moscow-led global powerhouse. But, his planned Eurasian Union won’t be grounded in ideology: This time it’s about trade.
The concept of regional economic integration may be losing some of its allure in Europe, where a debt crisis is threatening the existence of the eurozone. But some countries across the former Soviet Union, still struggling economically 20 years after becoming independent, are embracing Putin’s grand ambition.
Russia has moved one step toward this goal under an agreement with former fellow Soviet republics Belarus and Kazakhstan that as of Sunday allows the free movement of goods and capital across their common borders.
As Putin envisions it, the still-hypothetical union will eventually stretch from the eastern fringes of Central Europe to the Pacific Coast and south to the rugged Pamir Mountains abutting Afghanistan.
The drive to somehow reform at least a husk of the Soviet Union has been around since 1991. T
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The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has rejected Valero Energy Corp.’s request for retroactive tax exemptions at six refineries, a ruling that relieves many municipal and school district officials.
An affirmative decision would have required local governments already crunched by lean budgets to pay back millions of dollars to the company, which officials feared would set a precedent for other industries to file similar requests.
In 2007, Valero filed six applications for 100 percent tax exemptions on $1.6 billion in hydrotreaters, units which were installed to remove sulfur from crude oil.
Valero cited the units’ partial environmental benefits as reasons the equipment fell under a 1993 voter-approved constitutional amendment designed to reduce pollution through tax breaks for certain pollution reduction measures.
Valero’s two Corpus Christi refineries were included in the applications.
The commission reviewed Valero’s request and last week, Mark Vickery, executive director of the state’s environmental commission, notified Valero that the units don’t meet the law’s requirements.
Valero has 20 days to appeal the ruling.
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