News
The Nitsch Niche
August 25, 2010
| How to beat the odds in a recession? Nitsch Engineering attributes its 12% staff growth in the past 17 months (up to 65 employees) to investing in marketing and biz dev. To see what they do, check out the construction underway to refashion Boston's Peabody Square, the city's first federally funded Green Streets project. |
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| The firm has carved out a niche as a go-to civil engineer but also as a specialist in planning and designing sustainable sites for green building projects. We snapped the firm's top management: founder and president Judy Nitsch, right, COO Lisa Brothers, and CFO Michael Kenealy. Judy is excited about Peabody Square, being built with ARRA funds, becoming safer, greener, and more efficient. (Boston's maze-like intersections are something we're all familiar with.) This reconstruction, designed with CRJA, will help de-clog streets, add lanes for buses and bikes, widen sidewalks, and reduce/cleanse stormwater runoff. |
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| Cheeta Soga, here with Michael, has worked with Judy on projects like Kroon Hall at Yale. Completed in 2008, it houses the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, so you can bet getting LEED Platinum (which it achieved last year) was important. OLIN and Nitsch designed a sustainable stormwater management system that turned what could have been a difficult, hilly site into beautiful landscaping with a water feature that helps handle all the run-off and harvest it for re-use. Cheeta and 25 other colleagues are LEED APs. |
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| Judy with some of her transportation engineers: Jerry Blumenthal, Steve Farr (who we caught on his first day at the firm), Davren Chartier,and Rafa Urbino. They're part of the team that's helped Nitsch expand its reach beyond New England to projects in New Jersey, New York, Virginia, and Taiwan. Also, Nitsch's land surveyors are up on cutting-edge technology like laser scanning for BU, they scanned 40 Bay State Road buildings, collecting highly detailed data, even from inaccessible areas, in half the time of traditional equipment. Then the info helps produce precise AutoCAD drawings. |
