Vern Hall
President & CEO
Vernon E. “Vern” Hall, P.E. is Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of Galactic Harbour Associates, Inc. He has spent his entire professional career in the Transportation Industry: highways, main-line rail, deep-water commercial port facilities, bridges, inter-modal facilities, pipelines and now space. He graduated from UCLA with a degree in Engineering and subsequently obtained a license in Civil Engineering (C16877) from the State of California.
He served on active duty in the U.S. Navy as a shipboard engineering officer and Ship Superintendent at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard. Following active duty, the returned to CALTRANS and led a team planning freeway routes through the Los Angeles metropolitan area. In 1970, he joined the Port of Los Angeles (POLA) engineering division.
During his 27 year career at POLA, he played a leading role in redeveloping and expanding it from a regional port into the largest container terminal and intermodal complex in the Western Hemisphere. He retired in 1997 as Deputy General Manager/Director of Development after serving as Chief Harbor Engineer, 2020 Program Manager and lead project engineer.
His most significant accomplishment was the 2020 Program Master Plan that he jointly planned with the neighboring Port of Long Beach and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Implementation of this plan included: permitting and mitigation projects, design and construction of container terminals, deep water dredging, massive land reclamation, in-terminal intermodal rail yards, bridges, highways, and, most significantly, the Alameda Corridor mainline rail connecting the Ports to the transcontinental rail system. In terms of cost, time and complexity, the successful implementation of the multi-project 2020 Plan and its adjunct, the Alameda Corridor, were mega-projects.
Following retirement from the Port, he has remained active in the port and transportation industries as an independent consultant. He maintains active membership in several relevant professional organizations, including: American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Project Management Institute (PMI), American Association of Port Authorities (AAPA), U.S. Naval Institute, National Space Society (NSS) and International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC). With ISEC, he was the principal author of ISEC’s “Design Considerations of a Space Elevator Earth Port”.