Business Feeds

Navy Pier, the highly commercial tourist attraction jutting into Lake Michigan, will take on a more parklike feel under the first phase of redevelopment plans formally announced Friday.

Due to cost constraints, the initial $176 million remake does not include some of the more dramatic elements floated by the design team, such a swimming pool with a sand beach.

But it includes an array of upgrades aimed at making the state’s most visited tourist attraction a place where visitors can splash in an interactive fountain that transforms to a skating rink in winter, stroll along a heavily planted promenade and rest on an undulating stairway with unobstructed views of the lake and skyline.

• Related
• Changes to Navy Pier, McCormick Place in ‘Elevate Chicago’ proposal
• DePaul arena part of Emanuel’s $300 million in projects
• Classic Navy Pier
• Destination: Navy Pier in Chicago
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• Maps
• 600 East Grand Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611, USA

The grand stairway will face south, “inviting people to sit and face the sun and look out,” said landscape architect James Corner, who leads the design team selected in an international competition last year.

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Robert A. Peiser, the USA Truck Inc. board chairman who submitted a conditional resignation Wednesday, told Arkansas Business on Thursday that he’s “hopeful” he’ll be retained by the pubicly traded Van Buren trucking firm.

Peiser, who was named to the board in February 2012, technically  at the company’s May 8 annual meeting to be re-elected. But those votes were outnumbered by a block of withheld votes that came at the urging of an advisory group unhappy with the executive.

Board members now have 60 days to decide on Peiser’s status. Pesier said Thursday that he would not plead his case to the board. He said he would let what he viewed as progress made since November, including the hiring of new CEO John Simone, speak for itself.

“I couldn’t tell you how they’re going to come out,” Peiser said.

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Bangladesh offers the global garment industry something unique: Millions of workers who quickly churn out huge amounts of well-made underwear, jeans and T-shirts for the lowest wages in the world.

But since a building collapse April 24 killed at least 1,100 garment workers in Bangladesh in one of the deadliest industrial tragedies in history, the country has gone from one of the industry’s greatest assets to one of its biggest liabilities.

“The risk factors have jumped off the charts,” said Julie Hughes, president of the U.S. Association of Importers of Textiles and Apparel, a trade group that represents retailers who import garments. “This is worse than what anyone had imagined.”

Working conditions in Bangladesh’s garment industry long have been known to be grim, a result of government corruption, desperation for jobs, and industry indifference.

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I am extremely happy that we have finally relaunched the website for Advanced Human Technologies Group.

The launch of a blog on the AHT Group website as well as the forthcoming launch of more online publications by the group means that I will shift my blogging activities, tending to write more on other sites than here, though also pointing to those posts from this blog.

Launching the new group website is also part of a increased focus on our ventures, including a series of new companies we are creating. As such I will be sharing more about our companies, projects, structures, and lessons learned along the way. Our experiments with new business models will become a lot more visible. Exciting times ahead!

Workers walk through the Unit 2 construction site at Watts Bar Nuclear Plant in Spring City, Tenn. Photo by Dan Henry /Chattanooga Times Free Press.

Equipment tests to verify the reliability of safety systems installed at TVA’s newest nuclear plant have not detected any problems so far, TVA officials told regulators Tuesday.

In a status meeting with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Atlanta, TVA top nuclear officials said the utility has improved procedures and rechecked equipment at the Watts Bar Unit 2 reactor being built near Spring City, Tenn.

Last year, the NRC cited TVA with three apparent violations for installing thousands of parts at Watts Bar that were not documented or tested for nuclear-grade quality and for not following proper quality control to detect the documentation failure.

Ric Wiggall, senior engineering manager at Watts Bar, acknowledged Tuesday that TVA likely violated NRC requirements for equipment verification in the new Unit 2 reactor.

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The arch for the Waikiki Natatorium War Memorial would be relocated under a plan by the state of Hawaii and City and County of Honolulu t demolish the crumbling pool and structure and create a public beach on the site.

The Waikiki Natatorium War Memorial pool will be demolished under a plan by the state of Hawaii and the City and County of Honolulu to turn the crumbling, unused structure into a public beach.

Gov.

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Beth Heinen Bell and her husband, Christian – like a rising number of Americans – are ready to jump into the real estate market and become homeowners. Yet they’re running into an obstacle that’s keeping the national housing recovery in check: There aren’t enough homes for sale.

The housing shortage they face in Grand Rapids, Mich., a city known for its furniture industry and sleek downtown hospital complex, is fairly typical of what the country as a whole is facing this spring.

Some markets along the East and West coasts have grown red-hot. A handful of other cities remain depressed nearly four years after the Great Recession ended. But many more places are like Grand Rapids – a metro area of roughly 1 million that is strengthening slowly but steadily.

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The Broadmoor hotel, which has pumped more than $300 million into new construction and renovations over the last 15 years, will be updating nearby residents on its current $90 million in development plans, including a potential project to upgrade its historic east golf course.

Broadmoor President and CEO Steve Bartolin said on Monday that hotel representatives plan to brief neighbors at a meeting from 6 to 8 p.m.

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The National Transportation Safety Board on Tuesday began a two-hearing designed to distill bigger lessons about airplaine certification from the failure of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner battery that caught fire on a runway in January.

“We are looking for lessons learned, not just for the design and certification of the failed battery but for knowledge that can be applied to emerging technologies,” NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman said in opening the hearing. “It’s imperative to understand how to best oversee their development and certification.”

The proceeding is being simultaneously translated into French and Japanese to accommodate journalists and observers from Europe and Japan.

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