THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, October 23, 1995 TAG: 9510210191
SECTION: BUSINESS WEEKLY PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: TALK OF THE TOWN
LENGTH: Long : 109 lines
In the old days, if the U.S. Navy needed a motor rewound, there were any number of Navy installations equipped with the tools and the shoreside crews to do the work in Hampton Roads. In these days of a smaller fleet, though, the Navy is shrinking the shore force. It's turning to a few centers of excellence, where skilled workers train and work alongside sailors from the ships.
Centers of excellence will be among the topics discussed Tuesday and Wednesday when the American Society of Naval Engineers co-sponors the 5th Fleet Maintenance Symposium. The session will begin at 8 a.m. in the Virginia Beach Pavilion.
A long line-up of speakers in scheduled, ranging from Adm. Jeremy M. Boorda, the chief of Naval operations, to Robert E. Boruff, vice president of manufacturing operations at Saturn Corp., the GM car company.
Why invite an auto engineer?
``Everybody in business has already gone through this. They're trying to find out how to use technology to be more efficient. The automakers are already doing this,'' said ASNE spokesman Raymond Michilini of CACI, a computer systems integration firm based in Arlington.
More than 100 exhibitors from throughout the United States have signed on for the conference, though the focus will be on the seminars featuring experts from the armed forces and industry.
Subjects include fiber optic lighting for shipboard applications, extending equipment life through real-time operating advice, the changing times of submarine maintenance, composite materials applications in the Navy's carrier fleet, and titanium, billed as the cost effective solution to the Navy's maintenance blues.
Tunnel talk: When it comes to cellular phone calls, that dip in the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel is murder. Many a cell-phone conversation has gone dead inside the tunnel and all the others in tunnel-rich Hampton Roads. Sprint Cellular and GTE Mobilenet, former Contel Cellular, are planning to make tunnel phone-talking a little less intrepid, however.
GTE Mobilenet is replacing repeaters on each end the eastbound and westbound tubes of Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel with actual cell transmitters, which ought to lessen call cutoffs. The work is to be completed by the first quarter of next year.
Meanwhile, within the next several months Sprint Cellular plans to install the equipment necessary to carry phone calls through the Monitor-Merrimac Bridge-Tunnel. Sprint already has coverage in the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel.
Both carriers have fairly good coverage inside the Midtown and Downtown tunnels, and don't plan to upgrade it. Neither has put transmitters inside the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, nor plans to do so.
Whoops: The two-for-one stock split announced by CSX Corp. was incorrectly described in an article on regional stocks in last week's Business Weekly.
Holders of CSX common stock will receive one additional share for each share they own on Dec. 4.
Sharp leaves DRI: Richard L. Sharp resigned from the Dominion Resources Inc. board. He and three others joined the board last year, a coup that strengthened the hand of DRI chairman Thomas E. Capps.
Sharp helped quiet DRI's bitter feud with its Virginia Power subsidiary. He reportedly stepped down to devote more time to his business. He heads Richmond-based electronics retailer Circuit City Stores Inc.
Medical pressure: Doctors working alone are becoming ever more rare. Last week, Sentara Health System closed four single-physician offices on the Peninsula. Doctors and patients moved into group practices in Denbigh and Hampton.
``The demands, the pressures, the challenges - just dealing with all the HMOs and insurance companies - you really need partnerships and physicians working together,'' Sentara vice president Don Jellig said.
Customer focus: Roanoke-based Carilion Health System, Virginia's largest health care provider, will axe 10 top managers by Jan. 1 and cut 125 middle managers jobs within two years.
``To get to the next step of where we want to be competitively, we need to look at ourselves more as a system than a collection of hospitals,'' Carilion president Thomas Robertson said. ``It will allow us to become more patient and customer focused.''
Tidewater bound: The Military Sealift Command intends to make Norfolk its East Coast operations center. Some functions from New Jersey and Washington would be transferred, though it's not clear yet if employees will be relocated to Norfolk. The command may decide to assign the duties to personnel already in Hampton Roads, said sealift command spokesman Margaret Holtz.
The sealift command, which operates 136 shifts, currently employs about 150 people in Norfolk.
Oh uh, Mr. Warner: Virginia Sen. John Warner said in a recent radio ad: ``Did you know America spends more on welfare than national defense?'' Bob Bixby heard the ad and bristled.
``That sort of perception is one of the major problems in balancing the budget,'' Bixby said. ``People always want to go after the least popular programs. Whether it adds up or not seems to be totally irrelevant.''
Bixby, national field director for the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan nonprofit group intent on balancing the federal budget, said welfare spending falls far short of the $280 billion defense budget. He said:
Aid to Families with Dependent Children runs about $31.5 billion in federal and state money combined. Food stamps costs about $27 billion. The Supplemental Security Income program, serving chiefly the disabled, costs $29.4 billion. The tab: about $88 billion.
Warner's campaign said the ad accurately portrays misguided federal budget priorities. by CNB