• You’ve brought up Michigan Central, Little Caesars Arena, the Hudson’s Detroit projects. Can you talk a little bit about the company’s role in those and how those materialized?

We’ve been in the city pre-2000. We’ve been headquartered there for over 20 years and really in the last 10-15 years have become sort of the go-to firm for redevelopment projects in the city, large-scale and small-scale. That includes work on the new Henry Ford Health campus and (Michigan State University) building that they’re doing over there, the University of Michigan Center for Innovation, Motown Museum, (Little Caesars Arena), Hudson’s tower. 

The team we have in the city that does that work has really perfected the effort that it takes to get those projects done, working really close with development teams and city agencies all over the map. People know to come to us for those types of projects and our name shows up on nearly everything that’s happening down there.

• What sort of general engineering industry trends are you noticing?

The redevelopment of sites and the challenges of environmental issues, we’re seeing that both in the city and in the inner-ring suburbs. Any time we touch any kind of undeveloped land in an inner-ring suburb, there’s a potential for contamination that needs to be addressed.

On the municipal side, just the increase in cost to build these infrastructure projects and how that gets funded is still always a challenge. Communities that maybe have a limited tax base and a limited utility user fee base have to be very careful where they spend those dollars, and then obviously growing communities have to make sure they are targeting where they are spending the dollars to not promote sprawl, but serve their community as well.

• Engineering faces a lot of the same talent issues that other industries do, which is finding mid-career professionals with five to seven or 10 years of experience. What can be done to address that?

I think it’s reaching out as early as possible. In my career, I don’t think anyone ever came and spoke to me about what civil engineering, or planning, or surveying was, so I think we need to try to make an effort with doing some work with high schools for trade shows and work that our surveyors would do. But really getting into the schools, both high school and college, as early as possible and exposing people to these careers and really showing how much of this actually touches their everyday life. When students see that, they’ll certainly understand the importance of the work that we do and hopefully they’ll gravitate toward that. We need more people in these careers. That’s key.

• In the last few years, Giffels has had some of its longtime partners and leadership retire. How did that materialize from a succession planning standpoint?

In the past three years, we’ve had about 40% of our ownership transition and you’d never know it by how smooth everything went. That’s a testament to the communication amongst our group of partners in the firm and long-term planning and visioning for what that looks like. It’s really about people sitting in the room and being honest with each other about what their expectations are and what they want to see happen in the next three to five years. We really strive to do that, even the younger group that’s now running the company. That transition process never stops.

• What’s the strangest or most interesting thing you’ve encountered on a job site?

Doing work in the city, the ground is just layers of decades of things that have occurred. You’re always finding things like old trolley tracks. Just the unknown that gets buried in the ground, and determining if something is supposed to be there and active or not. Environmentally, some of the things we continue to see everywhere are (remnants) of the mentality of the late 1950s and 1960s where people just buried things and didn’t think about what might happen 50 or 60 years later.

• You’re also a somewhat newly minted planning commissioner in Grosse Pointe Park and also involved in sailing. Can you talk a little about that?

I did recently join the Grosse Pointe Park Planning Commission and that was, really, I think an opportunity to take the experience I gained on the municipal side, attending those meetings for clients, and take the information and apply it to my community. We’re a built-out community, so there’s not a ton of new development, but when redevelopment does come in, it’s really crucial that it be done right. I’m excited to make that happen.

Living on the east side, with really good access to Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River, my daughter is a high school sailor, which of course drags us into sailing as well and has caused use to buy a very old sailboat that we share with a friend and try to use our very limited sailing knowledge to hopefully race this coming year. We just kind of started last fall, so it’s going to be an interesting summer coming up in 2025.