Michelle Salyer:                Welcome to Outside the Box with BRPH, where we discuss the most innovative, interesting, and outside-the-box solutions to some of the most exciting and challenging projects in the world of architecture, engineering, design, construction, and mission solutions.

You’ll hear directly from the problem solvers at BRPH as we dive deep into the latest news, trends and topics in aerospace, defense, manufacturing, and industrial, commercial, education, entertainment, and hospitality. I’m your host, Michelle Salyer, and I’ll be your guide as we open the lid on these topics and more, and invite you for an insider’s look at one of the most successful, fastest-growing employee-owned AEC firms in the United States. Welcome to Outside the Box with BRPH.

When it comes to selecting a site for a new commercial or industrial project, hundreds of factors come into play. For a large-scale project like a new manufacturing facility, this might be the single most important decision an owner can make, affecting profitability for years to come. Where do you start? What criteria should you consider? And where do you go for assistance? With me today to answer those questions and more are Casey Barnes, Regional Market and Economic Development leader for BRPH, and Jennifer Harvin, National Practice Leader for Civil Engineering. Welcome, Casey and Jennifer.

Casey Barnes:                  Thanks, Michelle. Great to be here.

Jennifer Harvin:                Hi, Michelle.

Michelle Salyer:                Great. Thank you so much for joining us today. So Casey, tell me a little bit about your background and how you ended up at BRPH.

Casey Barnes:                  Well, I’m a lifelong economic developer, and for many years I served as the aerospace and defense lead for Enterprise Florida, which is the state’s Department of Commerce, for lack of a better term. And in that role, I helped recruit lots of companies in the aerospace and defense world, and then I moved on to the region of Orlando and served every industry sector, working to make that community much more competitive.

I met this company, BRPH, at the ribbon-cutting for all these companies. There are a lot of companies that I worked with to bring them here. And we formed a good relationship. They’re a fantastic firm. When they called about an opportunity, it was a pretty quick conversation, so the stars kind of aligned for me.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. And tell me what you do for BRPH now.

Casey Barnes:                  So now, I work to understand client drivers and help them solve their issues in a different way. It might be establishing a facility here in Florida or somewhere elsewhere on the planet, but also helping communities as well. It could be that helping them to be more competitive helps our company in the process, too.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay, great. And Jennifer, I know you’ve just been promoted to National Practice Leader recently. Congratulations.

Jennifer Harvin:                Thank you so much.

Michelle Salyer:                Tell me about that new role for you at BRPH.

Jennifer Harvin:                Yeah, so that’s, as of January, National Practice Leader. So basically, I’m supervising all of our civil folks in all of our offices. So before that, I was group leader here in the Melbourne office. And so, in that role I was engineer of record on a lot of projects, mentoring staff, our EIs, providing that kind of support. I was also doing some project management type roles.

Now, in the new national practice leader role, I’m going to be doing both of those things, but I’m also going to be supporting the larger growth for civil. I’m going to be supporting our project managers closer, working with our employees on our West Coast, supporting them with quality control, just trying to make some improvements within our department for the company’s goals, and helping more with proposals and trying to support client growth.

Michelle Salyer:                Wow. Big job.

Jennifer Harvin:                Yeah, I’m excited.

Michelle Salyer:                Great. Well, let’s jump into site selection. So Casey, give me a high-level view of what we’re talking about here.

Casey Barnes:                  Site selection. That might actually be a little bit of a misnomer.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay.

Casey Barnes:                  In some ways it’s more of a site elimination. Since we live in a highly competitive world and companies almost always have a great number of choices, their main problem really is trying to find the right site because there are so many decent sites. And it’s really important for anyone working to help a client is to understand it’s about them. You have to understand what their needs and wishes and wants are now, today, and into the future. So once you have all of that, you have to understand also that they make decisions based upon three very high-level factors, speed, cost, and risk. And once we understand those factors, we can then begin to get into what might make good dirt for them.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. What do you mean by good dirt? What is good dirt?

Casey Barnes:                  Oh, geez. Well, some of that might have to do with looking at it technically, looking at the site in and of itself. Jennifer probably has a better handle on some of those things and can cover those items, too.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay.

Jennifer Harvin:                Yeah, from the technical side, there are a handful of things. I’d say that the first one would be topography. So basically elevation. Because what we’re finding now on a lot of our projects for our clients, and even when we’re working with our own construction services, is that fill material is very expensive and it tends to be one of the most costly parts of construction.

So from our standpoint, we could help guide our client in that regard. Even before a site is selected and you have a survey and you know what the actual elevations are at the site, you can do some desktop reviews to kind of get an idea so you know if historically, is this a low site? Is this a site that’s in a floodplain? Is this a site that we think, from an elevation standpoint, is going to be costly to develop? We could also do a little bit of, again, desktop research to identify, “Is the soil good?” Is it permeable? Is it soil that water can infiltrate more easily that would make it better from a stormwater management perspective?

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. To avoid flooding?

Jennifer Harvin:                Well, yeah, to avoid knowing if you’re going to need to have possibly to raise your site, if you’re going to have to maybe have to have a wet pond as opposed to a dry pond. And we know from a technical standpoint, if you need a wet pond, dry pond combo, your percentage of development for stormwater management is going to just naturally increase. The rule of thumb used to be maybe 15%. Now we might say you might have 30% of your site for stormwater management.

Michelle Salyer:                Wow.

Jennifer Harvin:                So those are things that we can do a little initial research to help guide the client. I can keep going, there are lots more.

Michelle Salyer:                Yeah, tell us more. Tell us more.

Jennifer Harvin:                Yeah. Okay. So also, is this area, does it possibly have wetlands? We don’t know that for certain until we get an environmentalist on site, but we can do some initial research to say, “Based on the national wetlands inventory, are there known wetlands on the site?”

Michelle Salyer:                So in terms of conserving that area?

Jennifer Harvin:                Well, in terms of knowing that if you want to develop it and you have a lot of wetlands on the site, this may be just a site we’re going to eliminate. Right?

Michelle Salyer:                Okay.

Jennifer Harvin:                Because it just might have too many, because we know that in order to develop a site that has a lot of wetlands, the mitigation costs can be high, the permitting process can be long. So those are things we can help them identify right off the bat as potential issues.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. Speaking of conservation, is there ever a concern regarding endangered species?

Jennifer Harvin:                Yes, absolutely. Sometimes we could have maybe gopher tortoises. That’s a big one here in Florida. If we identify that we have gopher tortoises, we know that there’s going to be a little bit of a lengthy process for permitting because they have to be moved to a more suitable site. You can’t develop. It does just increase the length of time to get through permitting. Sometimes they find through environmental assessments that there are species on the site that need to be relocated, but you can only relocate them during certain times of the year, which is a-

Michelle Salyer:                Very interesting.

Jennifer Harvin:                … odd and interesting thing. Yeah. So you might determine if you were to have some of those endangered species on your site, it could affect your construction schedule. So, those are certainly factors for our owner if they’re needing to develop quickly. If it’s an area that has the potential, we might guide them in the direction of that site might not be ideal for their construction schedule.

Michelle Salyer:                Interesting. Interesting. And what about existing infrastructure? Are you working with sites that are already developed in that way or both?

Casey Barnes:                  It’s a mix, really. And when you look at quote, unquote, “Good dirt,” there are literally hundreds and hundreds of decision factors that could come into play for a specific decision that a company might need to make. And one of those factors might be speed. They really need to be in a specific location at a specific time. We might be looking at a site that has all of the natural attributes. It’s got great transportation access, it’s got great access to power and water and sewer, and all of those things are nearby, but the ownership is not solidified. Right?

Michelle Salyer:                What do you mean by that?

Casey Barnes:                  Let’s say we know Bob, and Bob’s got a farm, it’s been in his family for five generations. Bob’s getting a little up there in age and is looking to pass it along to the next generation. Well, the challenge is the next generation may not be on the same page with Bob and what his vision might be with the property.

And that vision might include a great site for industrial development and jobs creation for the next generation. Bob’s children might not be on the same page. That causes major questions, and potentially concerns and delays. And if a company is on a very tight timetable negotiating that long process with the family of Bob, it may not work.

Michelle Salyer:                So that’s a pretty common concern?

Casey Barnes:                  Absolutely, it is.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. Interesting. Interesting. So many factors to consider. Wow. What about workforce, Casey? I know as an economic developer, that’s always a concern for you.

Casey Barnes:                  Well, really from a workforce perspective, if you can’t answer the question of who’s going to work there? Do you have the available talent there to do the work that the company needs done and at a reasonable cost? If you can’t answer those two questions first, there really isn’t much point in answering the rest of the questions. It doesn’t matter how good your site is. It’s going to take a huge amount of effort to either train up, which might not be possible in the time allotted, or bring in the number of workers that are needed. So, workforce development and answering the workforce question is absolutely critical, and it’s really one of the first places an economic developer starts.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. It sounds like there’s so much benefit to helping companies establish in an area because they’re going to attract more like businesses and that attracts more workers, and it’s just kind of a repeating cycle?

Casey Barnes:                  No company operates in a vacuum, and being part of an ecosystem is what every company wants. It’s really hard to be first, right? A lot of companies want to be second or fourth or later. It does take a lot of guts for a company to be first, but that also is the challenge of an economic developer to say, “This is what the data shows.” You may not think that a community has what it takes, but you probably believe the numbers. So if the numbers align, we can show a collaborative attitude and an environment and a site that works with your timeline, you got to consider it.

Michelle Salyer:                Wow, interesting. So many things to consider. Let’s get back to infrastructure a little bit. So on a site, say like Bob’s farm, to stick with that example, if the existing infrastructure is not there, tell me about the complications that poses in terms of time, money, schedule.

Casey Barnes:                  Sure. So let’s just say power, for example. Bob’s got a nice high and dry site, but power is a little bit farther away. Let’s say it’s a mile away from the nearest feeder. That might cost a million dollars just to get the feeder there. And we have to assume then also that there’s right of way, and it doesn’t cross a roadway or a railway, or some other kind of infrastructure. And assuming all of those things are in place, the ante is probably about a seven-figure ante, a million dollars just to get the power there.

Michelle Salyer:                So in your experience as an economic developer, are communities working to prepare sites to attract business, or are they more so waiting for businesses to express that interest?

Casey Barnes:                  Yeah, it’s a great question. Those communities that are ready with sites that can check all of the boxes are going to win deals. It used to be that business was a little bit slower, and maybe I’m thinking of a long time ago, but companies are working to react to the market as quickly as humanly possible. And usually, the first person or first company there is an advantage. So for them, the certified sites are those that are more ready in their development are going to win.

Michelle Salyer:                Clients may not necessarily think about going to an architecture, engineering and construction firm when they need site selection services, so why does it make sense for BRPH to be involved at this stage in the process?

Casey Barnes:                  I’m not sure every architecture, engineering and construction firm has economic development in their DNA, but this one does. We bring all of the disciplines in-house. You start from master planning at the very beginning. We have civil, which Jennifer Capably leads, we have architectural engineering, we have electrical.

All of the disciplines that a company could need are in-house, plus we have economic development experience, too. There’s a lot of things that any AEC firm can’t do, and that’s why we look for partnerships in the local community and with others, to make sure that a company makes all the services that they need to make a great decision and have it stick.

Jennifer Harvin:                Yeah, and if I could add to that, sometimes it helps to have the ability to do some of the more technical stuff at the beginning as well. Our team can actually show them, conceptually, on a drawing, how their program fits, and we might be able to pull from some of our more technical knowledge. So okay, they say that they need a building that’s the size. Well, we can do research for that AHJ and say, “Well, you’re going to be required to have so many parking spaces and you’re going to need to”-

Michelle Salyer:                Sorry, what was AHJ?

Jennifer Harvin:                Oh, authority having jurisdiction. So whoever your permitting agency is.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay.

Jennifer Harvin:                Yeah. So, we might know that they’re going to need to have space for stormwater management, for landscaping, for driveways, sidewalks, things like that. And we can use some of our more technical abilities, like AutoCAD, we can draw something for them and show them, “Hey, all these components really do fit on this site,” or, “All these components don’t fit on this site.” Once you really see it, it helps to guide their decision.

Casey Barnes:                  Jennifer, that’s a great point. We’ve had clients come to us before and say, “We’ve got a specific box that we want to have replicated in another location.” Well, the site that looks the best isn’t the right shape, but if we recommend to the company to reconfigure their standard, quote, unquote, “Box,” we might be able to enhance efficiency and also fit it in a great site, too. We’re able to really think outside of the box, and either help a company visualize themselves, as Jennifer said, on a specific piece of dirt, or make that dirt even more attractive for the next client that’s evaluating location there.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. Okay. So I guess that’s where having the architecture in-house as well comes in handy?

Casey Barnes:                  That’s right.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. Let’s talk more about the civil engineering aspect though, and having land more ready, I guess. Why is it important to have experienced civil engineers involved at this stage? You’ve touched on that a little bit. Let’s dig a little deeper.

Jennifer Harvin:                Yeah, so some of the things we already discussed, but I would say that on the surface, some of those more technical components, they just might not be obvious to a potential developer. We can give them, like we talked about, information on topography. We can give them information on the environmental considerations, maybe let them know they need an environmental assessment that might take a long time, or their potential property has a permitting authority that we know has a very lengthy process.

We can just pull a lot of things from our experience and do, some of it could be research that we do, like I said before, desktop, using some of our resources. It could be digging a little bit deeper or doing some preliminary calculations for them. But I think that those things, again, they just wouldn’t be necessarily obvious if you’re just looking at an aerial of a plot of land. Yeah. Okay, it’s green. Well, maybe it’s cleared. Yeah, well, it might have contaminants. That might be an area that has impaired waters, which we deal with all the time. It’s not scary. That made it sound kind of scary. It’s not. It’s just that we know there are more permitting requirements. We know it takes more space to fulfill requirements if you’re in an area that discharges to an impaired water body.

Michelle Salyer:                For those who may not know, what is an impaired water body?

Jennifer Harvin:                Yeah. So, if your project has an ultimate discharge from rainwater. Wherever your site naturally drains, it might discharge into a body of water that has impairment for phosphorus or nitrogen, most specifically, and a lot of that is maybe due to fertilizer and things like that. That’s kind of, I think, how maybe some of those impairments started, but there’s a database. And you can identify, we can look it up, we can reach out to our contacts if we’re not sure and say, “Our site, we can identify we’re here, it drains.”

We can kind of follow that drainage pattern. Ultimately, gets into maybe this area of the Indian River. Is that area of the Indian River impaired? We can say, “It is.” So what we know, if it’s impaired, then our water management districts will have additional criteria to treat the water. So, rainwater has to infiltrate into the ground. You have to give it time for impairments to settle out before they can be discharged off-site. So basically what we know is, if you’re going to get to an impaired water body, you’re going to need more space on your site before it can do so.

Michelle Salyer:                So it sounds like doing your due diligence, maybe hiring an AEC firm initially to help evaluate some of these issues can really save time and money and a lot of heartache in the long run?

Casey Barnes:                  You’re completely right, and some of the best time spent is the decisions not made.

Michelle Salyer:                What do you mean by that?

Casey Barnes:                  We might find a fatal flaw that no one else did, that saves the company from a very big mistake that costs time and monies. For us, it’s serving the client as best as we possibly can and saving them time in the process.

Michelle Salyer:                When clients come to you for assistance, have they typically narrowed down their choices, or are you generally starting with a blank slate?

Casey Barnes:                  It really runs the gambit depending on what the client needs. For one major client, we evaluated 50 different proposals from 20 different states to help them get to a short list, and those we dug deeper into the criteria and ultimately helped the company make the decision.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay, wow. 50 sites and 20 states, that sounds like a lot of work.

Casey Barnes:                  Well, the good news and maybe bad news for a company is there are a lot of really competitive locations out there, and economic developers are working aggressively every day to showcase the best that their communities have to offer. And they’ve worked, in some times, decades to help get their sites ready to go. And for us, we want to make sure that there’s not a stone unturned. There may be a site that maybe has the perception that-

Michelle Salyer:                Or some attractive incentive, perhaps?

Casey Barnes:                  Well, the incentives are certainly a factor. It’s not the factor. There’s an old saying in the economic development, a good incentive can’t make a bad deal good.

Michelle Salyer:                Yeah. Yeah, makes sense. Are you working with communities or municipalities that are trying to make undeveloped land more attractive to the buyer?

Casey Barnes:                  Absolutely, and a lot of it, I think was said earlier, that visualizing a project or a facility on a specific site is sometimes some of the battle. Sometimes it also might help to alleviate a perception. There are communities around the country that get eliminated just because a CEO may not envision a project locating in that area. When we can showcase how a site can accommodate the company’s needs in multiple different ways, again, the data will bear it out, and oftentimes a company or a community can get another look.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. Interesting. Jen, do you want to add to that?

Jennifer Harvin:                Yeah. We have a really great client. I won’t name them by name. They have lease interests in a very large piece of property at Kennedy Space Center. I’ll just say that. We’ve had the privilege of working with them for the last couple of years to get that area ready for future tenants in the commercial space industry. It’s been very exciting. Basically, it started with a master plan that was performed for them by others, but then we came in when it was time to actually start the actual design and starting to move into construction. So, we’ve had the opportunity to support them in the design and construction of basically the spine of their many, many, many, many acres, and it’s basically getting all that ready for future tenants to be able to tap off of. It’s, in essence, creating the main source of utilities for all these future properties.

Michelle Salyer:                So it’s ready to build on?

Jennifer Harvin:                Well, it’s giving them the access, it’s giving them the utilities. We’ve done some design for some common infrastructure, stormwater management, and then we’re starting kind of parcel by parcel, area by area, to get it pad ready. So, starting to do some initial permitting for wetlands, to get the wetlands mitigated, and to get the sites basically brought up to grade to allow a tenant to say, “This is an easy site to develop on.” It’s basically, this is pretty much pad ready for us. Our utility connections are easy. Our permitting is a lot easier now. It’s been very exciting. We have one project that’s been fully constructed, one tenant. They’re almost at CO, so they’re the first in the neighborhood and hopefully be a lot more.

Michelle Salyer:                With so many projects all over the United States. How do you navigate working with so many states, so many communities, municipalities, all with their own incentives, laws, regulations?

Casey Barnes:                  Well, it’s so important to have experience in the local community. We actually have offices in 11 locations around the country, and they’re all formed with great business relationships, and we deepen those relationships in the community. And as usually say, if a design that is created doesn’t match local or state or regional codes, it’s not the permitting’s fault if they deny it. So understanding the local community and the players who make those decisions is absolutely critical. And then when we marry up what a company wants and what the community wants, great things happen.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. Jen, anything to add?

Jennifer Harvin:                Permitting is a huge part of what civil engineering does. We have to get usually multiple permits on every project, and so that requires us to be familiar with those different states or local agency requirements, rules, and we have to become experts. We’re definitely experts here locally in our Melbourne office. Our group has been permitting with these folks for 60 years. Definitely-

Michelle Salyer:                And yourself for 18, is that right?

Jennifer Harvin:                18. Yep. So, we definitely are experts, but we can become experts if we have civil, for example, and those other offices where you have projects, they’re the experts. But if we don’t, we will become. We’ll do all the research we need to do to determine what our design criteria are, we’ll identify what permits we need, and we’ll establish those relationships. We’ve done it for lots of clients in lots of different states. We had a really big project that started in North Charleston that really ballooned, developed, and-

Michelle Salyer:                In South Carolina?

Jennifer Harvin:                Yeah, made our company open a part of our market sector. That was very exciting. And we drove up there. We got the project. We were so excited. We wanted to be part of it. We didn’t want them to use a local civil. At that time, we didn’t have an office there. We drove up, we met the folks, we had all the meetings, we established the relationship. The project was very successful. And like to Casey’s point, then that turned into another project, and we had an office established there as a result. But those relationships are super important. Our group, we’re very cognizant of them. We’re always respectful of their time, their expertise. We do everything we can not to make anything-

Michelle Salyer:                Make them mad.

Jennifer Harvin:                Make them mad or make anything happen with those relationships because we want to work with them again, and we need to work with them again. So, that’s something that we are really proud of.

Michelle Salyer:                What would you say differentiates BRPH from other firms who might offer the same service or services?

Casey Barnes:                  Well, I think being here for 61 years with such a broad breadth of industries that we serve in the aerospace and defense, manufacturing and hospitality, education, entertainment, all of those areas require different skill sets and different needs. And economic development really is at the core of all of those. Each of these companies has a decision to make. And for us, if 80% of our business is repeat business, we’re probably doing something right on multiple fronts.

So, having an understanding of client drivers, what is affecting their decision from a speed, from a risk, from a cost perspective. If we can alleviate all of those concerns and help make their lives easier in the process, a happy client is probably a happy community, and vice versa. Our working with very complex and detailed and technical projects kind of brings us joy. It also brings a lot of value for our communities in which we serve and live.

Michelle Salyer:                That’s a great perspective. Thank you. Anything to add?

Jennifer Harvin:                Well, I’d say we have the expertise. Definitely that’s something that BRPH has. Like Casey said, with 60 years, definitely focusing on the market sectors that we do, we have expertise. And we’re also excited about what we do. Try to remind myself, our group, we’re privileged to work with the clients that we work with. It’s exciting when we get the repeat business. That means we’ve done a good job, and we’re really proud of that.

Casey Barnes:                  I forgot to mention also, we have a construction arm. We didn’t even talk about that as yet, but because of that, we can get real-time estimates in terms of cost and schedule that a lot of companies can’t.

Michelle Salyer:                Good point.

Casey Barnes:                  So we definitely leverage that and give our clients real-time information that they can take to the bank.

Michelle Salyer:                Fantastic. Those are great perspectives. Well, thank you so much, Casey and Jennifer, for joining me today.

Jennifer Harvin:                Thank you.

Casey Barnes:                  Thank you.

Michelle Salyer:                Thanks for joining us today for Outside the Box with BRPH. We hope you’ve enjoyed today’s episode as we explored some of the most innovative and challenging projects, and the most pressing issues and trends in the AEC world.

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