If you live in Southwest Washington or the Portland area, the odds are pretty good that you’ve seen some of the work of the architecture firm Burns & McDonnell — although you might not have realized it at the time. It might have been a power substation, or a data center or a section of the Portland airport.
“We do everything from start to finish on projects,” says senior vice president Mark Lichtwardt, who manages the Burns & McDonnell offices in Denver and Vancouver.
The Missouri-based design-build firm has had a hand in a large number of Pacific Northwest utility projects stretching back to the 1960s. And in 2011 the company opened the branch office in Vancouver to better serve local clients. The office completed a 3,200-square-foot expansion late last year as the company prepares to ramp up its Washington and Oregon operations.
One of the original 5,500-square-foot office’s rear walls was removed, connecting it to the new previously separate section of the building, which includes new cubicle space and conference rooms. The connecting hallway between the two wings is also being upgraded into a relay lab to help the team design and test electronics. The completed office is 8,700 square feet.
“Some clients have relay labs, so this allows us to do that service,” says project manager Rick Nye, who works at the Vancouver office.
About 85 percent of the company’s work in the Pacific Northwest has been in the power utility sector, Nye says — power plants, transmission lines and substations. That work will continue, he says, but the goal for future expansion is to push further into a more diverse lineup of additional projects such as wastewater treatment, food processing and data centers.
The data center sector is seeing particularly rapid growth in Washington and Oregon, Nye says, due to the region’s abundant supply of hydroelectric power supplied by the Columbia River. New projects are also coming online at the municipal level as both Oregon and Washington continue to see large population growth.
“All of that needs infrastructure upgrades,” he says. “In some cases one customer will drive 20 percent of your (electricity) load.”
Pacific Northwest expansion
Burns & McDonnell was founded in 1898 in Kansas City, Mo., and is still headquartered there, although the employee-owned company now operates more than 40 offices globally.
The initial 2011 Vancouver office was located near Vancouver Mall with just one employee who transferred from another region. But the branch has had to move twice since then as its number of employees has continued to grow each year.
The branch moved to its current office in the Stonemill Business Park off of Mill Plain Boulevard — 312 S.E. Stone Mill Drive — in March 2017 with 18 employees. The office now employs a staff of 30 with space for another 18.
“Vancouver’s been a great choice for us so far,” Lichtwardt says.
Washington’s tax structure was one of the incentives for settling in Vancouver rather than Portland, Lichtwardt says, but he adds that the company has considered both locations each time the office moved, and kept finding that Vancouver put Burns & McDonnell closest to both its clients and potential new hires.
The majority of the new staff were hired locally, Lichtwardt says, and the availability of skilled workers has been one of the big advantages of the Vancouver area.
The company’s long-term vision is to expand the Vancouver branch to as many as 100 to 200 employees, Lichtwardt says, either at a bigger office or by opening multiple local branch offices — but that expansion will be shaped by the company’s future slate of projects.
“Our growth will be driven by our clients,” he says.
