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Only the shell was retained when renovation began on Solider Field in Chicago, one of the most storied football fields in America. And retaining that shell made it a delicate job, say the Local 134 members who completed all of the electrical construction and renovationsincluding fire alarm, sound, lighting and communications.

Nothing but the outside walls were left standing when this $630 million project started at Chicagos historic Soldier Field.

It was not renovation, but brand new construction in San Diego, and Local 569 members did a lot of work on Petco Park long before they did the electrical construction. They were among the leaders in getting voters to approve the new $294 million baseball park. "We worked very hard to support this ballpark from the very beginning," said Local 569 Business Manager Allen Shur.

"We had as many as 300 volunteers walking the precincts to get the
vote out."

In all, more than 500 Local 134 members took part in the Soldier Field renovation.

The $630 million Chicago renovation took 18 months and was completed last September in time for the Chicago Bears 2003 National Football League season. Local 134 Business Manager Mike Fitzgerald expresses great pride in the more than 500 brothers and sisters "who were able to meet all of the complex needs of this outstanding project."

Elation over the success of the renovation is widely shared by the people of Chicago, who consider Soldier Field, originally constructed in 1924, as a national landmark. Its surrounding park displays impressive memorials honoring the men and women of the armed services as well as being home to "Da Bears."

It took a fast track schedule to deliver the Soldier Field job in less than 18 months, Fitzgerald says. Local 134 members installed more than 5 million feet of building wire, approximately 1.1 million feet of conduit, 20,000 circuit breakers and 14,500 light fixtures. When the Bears and Green Bay Packers re-christened the field last September, it was lit by 950,000 watts of light from some 600 fixtures of 1,500 wattsroughly enough to light 500 households.

Among the more delicate work, Local 134 members say, was constructing the two 23-foot by 83-foot video boards in each end zone. No fewer than 14 Chicago-area NECA contractors teamed with IBEW on the job.


Soldier Field, Chicago, Ill.	Petco Field, San Diego, CA

In San Diego, Shur says the saga of getting Petco built looked like the twists and turns of an extra-inning game.

In 1998, San Diego passed the ball park proposition. But it wont open until this season, six years later. The city and the ball club had to deal with numerous lawsuits on a multitude of objections. And, despite its strong support of the ballot question, Local 134 also had to pose some harsh objections of its own when the project builders opened talks with one of San Diegos largest non-union electrical contractors.

One of Local 569's biggest projects, the gigantic left field scoreboard, is coming along as the rest of the playing field and stands take their final shape.

IBEW filed a three-inch stack of comments on the project, and Shur says that among the filings by dozens of groups and individual citizens, the background documentation by IBEW was far and away the most comprehensive. "The ballpark developers were shocked by the depth and volume of the comments we filed," Shur says, and in the end "our comments were the only ones the council took seriously."

That led to seven months of tough negotiating for Shur and Art Lujan, manager of the San Diego Building and Constructions Trades, AFL-CIO. "As you can imagine, the negotiations were not always friendly," Shur says, but in the end the Padres management signed a Project Labor Agreement for all the construction work on the job.



The glitter the fans see at Petco Field required a lot of unseen work by IBEW members. Clockwise from top left, Terralyn Hartman, Fernando Martinez, Barry Ohm, Rodney La Grand (top) with job steward C.J. Towner, Jason Berkshire and Juan Reynaga.

The PLA allowed smaller contractors to bidnot the common practice on big jobs the size of Petcoand earned a lot of gratitude for the unions. The four electrical contractors on the job were all union, and 95 percent of all the construction work on the job was union.

And then, another snag. A little less than a year into the construction, the job was halted for more than a year while the city and the Padres wrangled with lawsuits that temporarily suspended the project. When work resumed, it was a race to be ready for opening day 2004.

Morrow Meadows was the electrical contractor in what Shur terms a technology rich project. It required more than 1 million feet of conduit to support all services, including two dozen mini-scoreboards, one huge scoreboard, lighting towers 250 feet high and 70 concession stands. At its peak, Morrow Meadows had 150 electricians and 16 foremen on the job.

All the audio and video installations were provided by Audio Associates800 television sets, over 500 speakers (most about 400 pounds each), approximately 200 amplifiers and a broadcast-ready cabling system for TV coverage of the games. Eric Clevenger, the project manager for Audio Associates, summed up the overall job:

"The level of coordination on this job has been amazing. We never had to worry about theft and we havent had any work-related injuries. You never get that on a non-union job. The professionalism that came with the Project Labor Agreement was tremendous."

It took extra innings. But the good guys won.

IBEW Local 569 members worked hard on the funding and the legal battles before they could start their real work on the new home of the San Diego Padres.

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