Business View - February 2016 119
Russell Pehl is the City Engineer. When all of the other
city departments decide upon which capital projects
they want to develop or have constructed, Engineering
Services has to implement and manage them all. His
challenge is less monetary and much more organiza-
tional: For example, Pehl’s division has to coordinate
the efforts of the street reconstruction project so any
old water and sewer mains below the streets targeted
for demolition get replaced as they become unearthed,
but before the new thoroughfares are laid down. “With
all these projects going on, it has definitely increased
the amount of work load for engineering; all the plan-
ning that we have to do to try and facilitate and get this
work done,” says Pehl. “So we’ve started outsourcing
a lot of our engineering, whereas before, we did a lot
of it in house.”
Regardless of the amount of work that needs to be
done, or the challenges before them, Kelton, for one is
eager to get going. “It’s exciting from a staff’s perspec-
tive,” he says, “because some of us - those who have
been here awhile – we’ve been banging our heads on
the wall for a long time, knowing all these problems
and issues were getting worse and worse. But now we
feel that the citizens, the Council, staff – we’re all fi-
nally getting in a straight line to march in the same
direction and we’re starting to accomplish things. And
for the first time, as long as I can remember, we are ac-
tively engaged in trying to fix our broken infrastructure.
And we have a plan. And that’s neat.”
Ricky Dickson is the Executive Director of Public Works.
His office oversees and coordinates all the work of the
INFRASTRUCTURE
