Harrington & Cortelyou bids Springfield adieu after 13 years

Kansas City-based civil engineering firm Harrington & Cortelyou Inc. has closed its local branch office, citing unfavorable economic conditions and a paucity of publicly funded projects.

Founded in 1928, Harrington & Cortelyou specializes in bridge work and transportation projects. The firm's Springfield office, which opened in 1996 through an acquisition of Wise Structural Engineering, designed several of the city's intersection-widening projects, including improvements at Chestnut and Kansas expressways and Republic Road and Golden Avenue.

Harrington & Cortelyou also won contracts to design the roundabout on State Highway 248 that feeds traffic into Branson Landing as well as some smaller Greene County bridge projects, President Doug Waltemath said.

"When we opened the office, we felt there was a great opportunity to get work with Greene County and the city of Springfield," he said from his Kansas City office. "And we did get jobs with them, but it just wasn't consistent enough to make a real good go of that office and expand it. And the recent economy was kind of what brought the decision to a head to close that office."

With no project backlog and few prospects for work in the next 12 months, Harrington & Cortelyou pulled the plug on its local presence Feb. 1. The firm's sole office - home to 22 full-time employees - is now in Kansas City.

The Springfield office, which was in the Missouri State University Alumni Center on South Jefferson Avenue, began with just three employees but never grew to more than four, Waltemath said.

Engineer Shannon Shank, who remains with Harrington & Cortelyou on a short-term contract basis, has managed the firm's local office since 2006. His staff comprised another engineer and two draftsmen, one of whom has retired.

Stacy Bergmann, an engineer in the city of Springfield's Public Works Department, was Shank's predecessor at Harrington & Cortelyou. He said local engineers who have lost their jobs in recent months have limited options in southwest Missouri.

"Currently, the engineering market is a very difficult market to find employment in," Bergmann said. "There are engineers I know of that have left the Springfield area ... to find work."

Shank said he's reevaluating his career and wasn't sure he would remain in engineering, although he plans to keep his license active. He said Harrington & Cortelyou was an "incredibly good place to work" and the Springfield office never felt like a branch.

"I just felt like my office was a lot farther down the hallway," Shank said, adding that he empathized with management's decision to close shop. "Over the last 10 years, it seems like a new engineering shop opens up in Springfield every six months. You've got more engineers competing for less work. Things we're just tightening up, and cuts had to be made somewhere. ... I really think they wrestled with this decision."

Anemic government budgets - from a local level all the way up to the Missouri Department of Transportation - and increased competition for public projects were contributing factors, Waltemath said.

"Everyone's a little tight-fisted right now," he said. "We're hoping that (the federal stimulus package) might loosen up money for some bridge work that had been put on hold because of lack of funds."

But Bruce Wylie, executive director of the Missouri Society of Professional Engineers, said the $787 billion spending bill approved by Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama last month doesn't appear to hold much promise for the state's engineering firms.

"There's a trickling of that coming to us, but the economic stimulus altogether ... is not impacting our industry as much as we wanted it to," he said.

Wylie said he wasn't aware of any other member firms that had shut down satellite offices in Springfield or elsewhere, although he did note an industrywide uptick in layoffs.

The Kansas City Business Journal reported last month that Overland Park, Kan.-based engineering firm Black & Veatch cut 140 employees in its energy division, followed two weeks later by a net reduction of 240 jobs at Kansas City-based architecture, engineering and design firm HNTB Corp.

"Missouri firms are the type that have a diverse client base, and so it's kind of like your portfolio," Wylie said. "If you have a diversity (of investments), it doesn't get hit as hard. I think our firms are managing to survive because of that."

Waltemath said Harrington & Cortelyou will continue to focus heavily on design work for projects prioritized by state transportation departments in Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska. He doesn't expect the firm to re-enter the Springfield market.

"We're going to stay pretty lean and mean right here in this office," he said.