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BUSINESS NEWS MICHAEL BAKER INTERNATIONAL AWARDED $2.2 MILLION CONTRACT TO PROVIDE CIVIL ENGINEERING SERVICES TO A 200-ACRE MASTER PLANNED COMMUNITY IN PALM DESERT, CALIFORNIA Michael Baker International , a global leader in engineering, planning, and consulting services, announced that it has been awarded a $2.2 million contract to serve as a prime consultant to University Park Investors, LLC to provide civil engineering and survey services associated with the development of a residential master plan featuring approximately 1,000 dwelling units as part of the University Park Specific Plan in Palm Desert, California. This award is an extension of the previous work completed by Michael Baker, consisting of the assessment district plans for major infrastructure – sewer, water, streets, and mass grading – serving the project site. The 200-acre University Park master planned community is contemplated to consist of several villages containing a variety of housing products, including attached townhouses, multi-family, alley loaded units, cluster motor court homes, and conventional small lot single family detached residential. Villages will feature a host of recreational and open space uses, and share a main recreational amenity that serves the entire University Park community. The community will be designed to provide a

variety of housing types, densities, designs, and a mix of uses and services to support healthy and active lifestyles for existing and future residents. The University Park Specific Plan emphasizes the preservation of open spaces by providing connections to nature trails and parks. The University Park Specific Plan provides the development framework for the master planned community that will cater equally to families, young professionals, and older residents. In addition to a variety of housing options, the community will ultimately include the future home of the California State University, Palm Desert campus. As a featured attraction of the community, the “Grand Paseo” – a desert garden trail, art exhibits, and displays of desert landscaping – will serve as the entrance to the Grove, a central community recreational and meeting area consisting of community gardens, event courts, an amenity center, a recreational pool, and covered playground. The Grand Paseo and the Grove will form the center of a looping “Art Walk” which incorporates open space parks and art experiences. “Michael Baker is proud to play a key role in assisting the developer and city of Palm Desert to continue a long tradition of creating high-quality desert neighborhoods while shifting toward more compact, sustainable, and pedestrian-oriented designs,” said

Mike Tylman, Michael Baker’s West Region practice lead for land development. “We make a difference by supporting the design of amenity-rich communities that balance high-quality open spaces with urban areas to foster interaction, activity, and safety.” As part of the contract, the Michael Baker team will support site planning efforts and provide core civil engineering design services, including grading, infrastructure design, and mapping. In-tract improvement construction is scheduled to begin early 2019, with project buildout anticipated by 2027. Michael Baker International is a leading provider of engineering and consulting services, including design, planning, architectural, environmental, construction, and program management. The company provides its comprehensive range of services and solutions to support United States federal, state, and municipal governments, foreign allied governments, and a wide range of commercial clients. Michael Baker’s more than 3,000 employees across nearly 100 locations are committed to a culture of innovation, collaboration and technological advancement to help solve challenges for clients and communities throughout the country.

SHAUN THERIOT-SMITH, from page 9

team. Young professionals today have unprecedented access to resources that develop skills and experience outside of their current careers – some may even be monetizing it. Do you have a CAD tech who’s a whiz with a drone at home? Does your newest engineer have uncanny videography talent because they grew a personal YouTube channel to thousands of subscribers? Is there someone on your team who spends weeks of their vacation time every year to help build water wells in disadvantaged countries abroad? While these skills likely won’t be creeping their way into your scope of services anytime soon, they could be just as impactful to the success of the firm as meeting your target metrics. But what’s in a utilization rate? A billable hour by any other name could be just as sweet (to your bottom line). Accountability and performance are paramount, but if you aren’t investing in the personal growth of your team members there’s little use obsessing over a KPI that can morph into a measure of employees’ skill at stretching their work onto a timesheet rather than one of productivity. Your team cannot be a place where you go to get something. It must be a place where you go to give. And when you put in that investment, its returns are exponential. SHAUN THERIOT-SMITH is a project engineer with BIG RED DOG Engineering & Consulting working on land development and infrastructure projects in the Greater Houston Area. A U.S. Army veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan, Shaun first became passionate to build communities at home by helping build those abroad. You can find more at his Building Bayou City blog attheriotsmith.com.

members unparalleled access to their firm, its leadership, and its resources. With this support behind me as a project engineer, I have felt empowered to grow further into a complete engineering professional – to pursue initiatives that leverage the special skills that I have developed or have wanted to develop in my career. The most recent example comes at hardly six months into my tenure – I sent up a one-page proposal on something I had dreamed of doing for some time. The leadership took a radical investment in my personal moonshot, and, in a stroke of serendipity, I interviewed the CEO on the company’s very first podcast (you can give it a listen at bigreddog.com/podcast). Your team members have moonshots too, and, with your help, their passion projects could be a multiplier for your “Accountability and performance are paramount, but if you aren’t investing in the personal growth of your team members there’s little use obsessing over a KPI that can morph into a measure of employees’ skill at stretching their work onto a timesheet rather than one of productivity.”

THE ZWEIG LETTER April 23, 2018, ISSUE 1245

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