Jerry Foelimi - General Engineering Corp.

My name is Jerry Foelimi, I'm from Portage. General Engineering Company, in fact has just celebrated it's 100th year anniversary as a consulting engineering firm. We work with Crane on a number of water and wastewater applications.

I think I've known well, in particular, a couple of the guys, Charlie Isham, and a few of the other ones that are getting up in years. I've known them for all the time that I've been with General. We rely on them. We go back and forth and it becomes a personal contact. If I've got a question on something, it may take us a few mintues to get to the question because we're talking about life and times and things like that. Other things that are going on. Eventually we get to solve the problem, but that part of it is as much part of the relationship as the actual technical stuff. That's what we appreciate, those working relationships.

We deal with a lot of different technical companies, equipment supply companies, because that's part of what we have to do to provide the correct selection for whatever the problem solution is for our communities. But what we found is dealing with Crane gives us a reliable, continuous result, if you will. Good advice. And of course [Crane] follows that up with solid products. So we can go back to our communities and say "we think this is the right approach, we think this is the right anwer for the problem that have" and we can sit back and say I've got Crane standing by my side, if something goes wrong. That's a good situation to be in.

Because my main focus is wastewater, I get involved with, oftentimes Charlie or Brad, on issues of a particular pump problem. In fact, the Village of Randolph is one that we're working on right now, doing an operations needs review. I called up Charlie and said we've got some pumps right now that are running at about 400 GPM, they're Gorman Rupp T4s, you know, I'm thinking that maybe we need to put VFDs on these. He said, no, we really should probably stay with the belt drive, we can just crank the RPMs up on the belt drive. The light kind of comes on and, oh yeah, I know we talked about that a few years ago wtih another situation, and sure that makes sense, and let's do that.

That's how it works.