Going far and wide for work

By Alex Gary

BusinessRockford.com

Joe Altenhoff and Gene Stoll were co-workers at a Rockford engineering firm more than 20 years ago when they started talking about a better way to run an engineering company.

In 1993, about six years after first discussing the plan, the two launched Arc Design Resources, a civil engineering and land surveying company. The company, which has 33 full- and part-time employees, is celebrating its 15th anniversary.

The company has done work for private employers — from First Rockford Group to Landmark Development to Wal-Mart Stores Inc. — and public entities ranging from the city of Rockford and Winnebago County to Byron and Oregon on road, water and sewer projects.

To keep from having any perceived conflicts of interest, Altenhoff and Stoll launched Municipal Design & Environmental Services in July. Municipal Design focuses solely on public-sector work, while the Arc Design staff works solely on private projects.

How is the residential construction slowdown affecting Arc Design? Local builders started on the fewest houses in the first quarter since the early 1980s.

The slowdown in the housing market is certainly affecting our private side. We’ve had the opportunity to work for some of the larger developers in town, and their work has not slowed down — it’s pretty well stopped. We’re hanging on to some work from our commercial clients, and we are working a lot more outside the region. We’re doing a project in Iowa right now, a couple in Wisconsin. We’re having to go where the projects are.

It’s hard. Last year, we were at 45 employees; we’re down to 33.

Voters in Machesney Park and Rockford passed sales-tax increases to pay for road rebuilding. Will that mean more work for local engineering companies?
The challenging thing for us is that our business is based on relationships. In Machesney Park, the village has a relationship with McMahon Associates out of Wisconsin. When that referendum passed, all that work is going through them. The road builders will benefit, but we won’t see any of that.

In Rockford, our firm was able to pick up a nice contract for the reconstruction of a street and the water and sewer work in conjunction with Rock River Water Reclamation District.

Do you think the public work will go up enough to offset losses on the private side?
We do. The public side certainly has the potential. We’re opening up the public side by trying to get into more than just pure engineering. We’re looking at some operational opportunities as well. We just hired a wastewater-treatment plant operator. We’ll be able to do wastewater-treatment operations for municipalities. That could dovetail into water-system operations, maybe some element of public works, to privatize that to some extent.

We’re aiming at smaller villages that don’t have large staffs.

Builders and architects can point to finished buildings to show people what it is they do. When someone asks you what Arc Design Resources does, is there a particular project you like to talk about?
One of the most clear examples, although it’s several years old, is the Logli supermarket on Charles Street in Rockford. That used to be an old Goldblatt’s site, and on that site used to be a wetlands from the part of Keith Creek that flows through there as well as certain flood-plain and floodway issues. To develop that property, we went through an exhaustive analysis with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to relocate the floodway and modify the flood plain and to provide some on-site storage of floodwaters so that property could be developed and not affect downstream development.

In the past couple of years, we’ve had significant rainfalls, and the elevation of the 100-year flood plain as planned pretty much matched what was actually out there in the field. That was a case where there was a lot of earth work and hydraulics that were required that people don’t normally see.

Reach Assistant Business Editor Alex Gary at agary@rrstar.com or 815-987-1339.