Page 26 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong
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 CORE VALUE: TEAMWORK
  If you look at the history of this type of technology, it really all goes back to DeSilva-Gates. They were the first on the West Coast to buy the 3D grading system.
– Tom King, salesman, SITECH
  For the next decade, DeSilva continued to shape the face of the East Bay with both public and private projects. In 1987, they won the largest Caltrans project awarded to-date: the $43 million I-238/I-580 interchange in Castro Valley. “There were 550 days left on the original 1,000-day schedule when Caltrans kicked the first contractor off the job,” recalls Gates. “We formed a joint venture with CC Myers and bid the project using the early completion bonus as our profit. That’s where we hatched this idea, right there in our office in Hayward. It was a risky move, but it worked. We finished fifty days early with a sizeable profit.”
It wasn’t until DeSilva started tackling the really big projects that they went Cat. Before that, they had “very little Cat equipment and very little new,” according to Gates. In April 1980, that all changed with the purchase of six new Cat machines for the Dumbarton contract. “We’d never spent that kind of money on equipment before,” says Gates. “After that job, we started realizing that buying new was much better than buying used junk. It was expensive to buy new, but we were much better off because of the maintenance costs.” Since then, DeSilva has bought hundreds of Cat machines. “For years, we did all our business with Peterson in the last week of December because of the ten-percent investment tax credit. So we’d trade in our old stuff to Peterson and buy new—ten, fifteen, twenty pieces at a time.”
Through much of the 1990s, DeSilva dominated the grading side of the local residential market. “We are always looking for new ways to improve our produc- tion performance, anywhere we can find it,” says Mike Archibald, DeSilva’s director of field operations, who spearheaded their move into 3D technology. “We started with 2D electronics, and that morphed into Total Station 3D technology. We bought our first 3D system for the San Jose International Airport contract
in 1998.” Prior to that, Tom King, current Peterson/SITECH salesman, flew Archibald back to Utah to see it in action. “I wanted him to see the proof-of-concept working on a jobsite, for himself,” says King, who was with Spectra 3D at the time (SITECH’s predecessor). DeSilva ended up buying the Blade Pro 3D system with ATS—or robotic total station—for two Cat 16G motor graders.“That San Jose airport runway job really opened their eyes to this technology because it made them more efficient, which saved them time and money,” recalls King. “If you look at the history of Spectra 3D and this type of technology, it really all goes back to DeSilva-Gates. They were the first on the West Coast to buy the 3D grading system. And once they got going, the other big contractors started to take notice.”
The 1990s were also a time of intense growth for DeSilva with the formation of DeSilva-Gates Construction (1995), Pacific States Environmental (1996), and the acquisition of Gallagher & Burk (1998). Through all that, the company relied heavily on outside rentals from Southern California to supplement their own fleet— until that source dried up. “By then, we needed more capacity and decided 657s were the way to go,” explains Gates.
In 1998 DeSilva bought eight new Cat 657 scrapers from Peterson. Five years later, they inked the deal that set off the Scraper Revolution of 2003–06 within the Caterpillar community. By the fall of 2003, the Bay Area housing market was on the verge of exploding.“We made a conscious choice to be Number One,”states Dave Vandegriff, DeSilva’s equipment manager (2001–present). “To do that, we needed to have the best machines available.”
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