Engineering Inc - July/August 2019 - 20

2019-2020 EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

Keith London

"As our industry gets better at automation to help manage and operate our clients'
assets over the next five to 10 years, you will
see more and more of it," says London, who
is president and CEO at Kennedy Jenks
Consultants.
NEW TYPES OF CLIENTS
AND FUNDING

It is not just the evolution and adoption
of automation that firms are seeing more
often-it is also opportunities to serve new
clients and find new ways to fund projects.
HNTB has worked solely in the government transportation market for most of its
114 years. Now, the firm is working with
companies such as Amazon and Apple-
adding to a growing list of private industry
customers. 
"They come in and they are looking
at moving 1,000 people to a community.
They are designing their own infrastructure
for their own campuses," says Vice Chair
Keith Jackson, senior vice president of
HNTB. "Or they are working with transit
agencies to get transit to their facility-but
they are building the infrastructure themselves. They are putting in a line and a
station, and they will be giving that to the
transit agency when they are done with it.
That has been done on local roads forever,
but bigger infrastructure, that is different."

The new partnerships with the private
market also come with a new outlook on
billing structures.
"The private market is less interested in
what our design cost is because they do
recognize we are an important but small
piece of the overall project," Jackson says.
"They are less concerned over our fee structure than they are over knowing that the
date is certain that a project is completed."
Some ExCom members maintain that
the industry has mixed reviews right now
from firms that do large-scale publicly
funded projects. Highways, bridges, tunnels and airport projects are not flowing
at comparable levels to privately funded
projects due to funding issues, but some
ExCom members see change on the
horizon.
"I believe there is the political will to
finally invest in the infrastructure of the
country," says Vice Chair John Carrato,
president and CEO at Alfred Benesch &
Co. "It sounds now like both parties are

John Carrato

on board, so I am very hopeful that we
will have some kind of capital plan for
infrastructure investment in late 2019 or
2020."
While government funding typically falls
short of what is needed, ExCom Treasurer
Stephanie Hachem says cities and states
are stepping up in the name of economic
development.
"We are going to find success in the
understanding and acknowledgement that
infrastructure projects have a big impact on
our ability to attract and sustain business,
and we are seeing a shift in understanding,"
says Hachem, senior vice president at
Kimley-Horn and Associates.
LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES

The rapidly changing engineering profession has fueled an entrepreneurial spirit

Keith Jackson

20

ENGINEERING INC.

JULY / AUGUST 2019

Stephanie Hachem

in many engineering firms, according to
NAECE President Michael Smith.
"New processes, new techniques, new
teaming arrangements-that is exciting
for engineering firm leaders," says Smith,
executive director of ACEC/Utah. "The
changing needs of the economy and their
clients continue to drive the engineering
industry to be creative."
Creativity will be required if traditionally public-serving firms want to cross the
chasm to more plentiful and, perhaps,
more lucrative private industry projects.
The U.S. spends about a trillion dollars
per year on construction projects. Federally
funded projects account for $200 billion
of the total, leaving $800 billion spent
on industrial, institutional, academic and
commercial projects, which are by and
large private sector-funded, according to
ExCom Chair Mitchel Simpler. He
believes that both private- and publicserving firms have the opportunity to learn
from each other and participate in different types of projects.

Michael Smith

"We have the ability for two related but
different market sectors to learn from each
other," says Simpler, managing partner of
Jaros, Baum & Bolles. "The things we do
in the private sector, which are in many
cases a different way of approaching how
Engineering Inc - July/August 2019

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