5
MAY MEETING REPORT
by Bud Vye, Retired CFM
Another nice weather evening on the 8th as a good turnout of 35
members and 13 guests showed up at the newly renovated West-
Mark One building, now called the SunTrust Business Center. Four
area units of the bank, including a large one from the building on
Parham Rd. just east of Broad, as well as 3 technical center units
have recently been consolidated into this 5 floor, 212,000 sq. ft.
building totaling 750 employees, with another 200 on the way.
We gathered in the building's RVA room where Groovin' Gourmets had done their usual nice
job of providing a fine assortment of hors d'oeuvres and liquid libations. The social period went
by all too quickly and, with President Jeff Sechrest having to be elsewhere this evening, it fell to
VP Adam Larsen to get the assemblage to move to an adjacent room, set up classroom style,
where he convened the meeting. New members and first time attendees were recognized and I
noted that we had a couple of Past Chapter Presidents with us in the persons of Karen Noel &
Sarah Cowherd that we hadn't seen for a while. Also present were a number of members and
guests who had had some involvement in the project, including Domenic Venuto of Common-wealth
Architects and Matt Boughan of Acoustical Solutions, whose firm had provided the
sound dampening panels we observed later as we toured the building.
The slate of officers for the next fiscal year was then reported and officially placed in nomination
by Nominating Committee Chair Kathy Taylor with all offices except that of Secretary (where
both incumbent Steve Pancham and Mike Calkins had been nominated) being unopposed .
The unusual situation of a contested election was handled by asking Mike Calkins (the only
one of the two present) to leave the room while a show of hands vote by members was called
for resulting in Mike being elected. The race for that office now determined, a motion to elect
the unopposed slate by acclamation was quickly made and passed so our entire slate (listed on
page 8) will be installed at our next meeting at the Diamond on June 12.
With the business portion of the meeting concluded, Sun-
Trust's Nat Shank was introduced. Welcoming us to the
building, he ran down a listing of the occupants it had housed
since it opened in 1976. All of them were banks under various
names except for MeadWestVaco which was most recently
here prior to the construction of their building near the Federal
Reserve Bank which we toured back in August of 2010 shortly
after it opened. I noted that the Chapter had held its Christmas
Party here in 1995 when it was the Operations Center for Capital One. After touching on the
process SunTrust had gone through to evaluate various sites for consolidating a number of their
scattered units before selecting this one, Nat gave us the highlights of the $100 million remodel-ing
project before leading the entire group on a tour, heading first up the elevators to the 3rd
floor and a section known as the Social Center, which reminded me of a very nicely furnished
break area or lounge.
Moving through areas where some staff were working in
Steelcase work stations while sitting on Herman Miller chairs,
we learned that the pretty gray carpet was from Shaw; the
lighting was all LED from Lutron; and the phones had been
provided by Avaya. We looked in on a conference room that
was described as a Microsoft Hub with an Interactive Wall and
(Continued on page 8)