AESI - AESI Featured In Quad State Business Journal

		AESI Featured In Quad State Business Journal Reichenbaugh Engineers Large Projects in Region by Yvonne Pfoutz, Quad State Business Journal January 2003 "In management classes, you learn about what motivates individuals. When I think about what motivates me, it's not money, not power, not prestige-it's the challenge," says Richard Reichenbaugh, P.E., who was recently named the Small Business Person of the Year by the Hagerstown-Washington County Chamber of Commerce. Reichenbaugh is vice president and principal of Associated Engineering Sciences, Inc. (AESI), a Hagerstown-based civil and structural Engineering firm with 15 employees who provide consulting and design services in not only the Quad-state area, but also in Ohio, Illinois and in China. Past AESI projects include the Martinsburg Mall; The Greens of Greencastle Golf Course; a five-story parking garage in Charleston, WV.; a 620-foot bridge which is the longest county-owned bridge in western Maryland; and the Friendship Technology Park being developed by Allegheny Energy around its corporate headquarters just outside of Hagerstown. Three current AESI projects-Mountainside Teleport Corp., the international Masonry Institute and the new Mental Health Center-are of special interest to Reichenbaugh because ". . . they'll have impact on the surrounding area for the long term." Mountainside Teleport Corp., a subsidiary of Intelsat Global Service Corp., plans to build 12 satellite dishes and a support facility in the Friendship Technology Park. "The final legal documents are not done, but the early grading is under construction," says Reichenbaugh. "Six to eight months of design and applications have been compressed into a six-week period. The county has been very helpful. With a high profile development that will benefit the community over a long time, they give it priority processing. "This is an exciting project for AESI and Washington County. This is a big, high tech development that may cause other companies to look at Washington County and say, 'If Intelsat is here, there must be a reason. "We've been working with the Friendship Technology Park for over two years, planning the infrastructure needs, road designs, and subdivision work. The Friendship Park is a diamond in the rough. It's close to the metropolitan areas; has transportation infrastructure, near I-70; dramatically cheaper land costs; and yet, it still has a rural feel." The International Masonry Institute (IMI) plans to purchase 26 acres of land and construct two additional buildings for its masonry job training program at the former Fort Ritchie site. IMI has been leasing buildings since 1997 from the PenMar Development Corp., which is redeveloping the closed fort. The IMI expansion, which is projected to create 200 new jobs at the institute and among its suppliers, should begin next summer. However, Reichenbaugh says, "The challenge is to have the land deeded to PenMar from the Army Corps of Engineers. It's a long drawn out process and frustrating for the client who already has the plans for the construction. But until it has title to the land, PenMar can't subdivide and can't have the site plan approved." Some of the delay in transferring the land has been the slow process of finding and removing unexploded ordinance. "Although the IMI land didn't have any unexploded ordinance," says Reichenbaugh. "Another problem is that everything on the base was autonomous-gas, water, sewer, telephone. One of the unresolved questions is who's going to be responsible for the upkeep of these systems. "The Mental Health Center [in Hagerstown] has given me more personal satisfaction that anything else I've done. The client asked me to be project manager-to determine needs, hire the architect, do site design, handle contractor bids, and provide construction management on site. My satisfaction was in helping them achieve what they envisioned without my dictating how it was to be done." Other Washington County projects have been delayed since the county commissioners voted in late October to halt major new developments in non-urban development areas for up to a year; the moratorium will be reviewed in the spring. "Obviously, my work is based on growth occurring," says Reichenbaugh. "But there are a number of ways of controlling growth; the best way is through proper planning, so we don't have the pitfalls of Frederick County [Md.], which has grown so fast over such a large area that the infrastructure can't keep up. You can have large scale development which shouldn't have adverse effects on normal life in the area if it's properly planned." In addition to civil and structural engineering, Associated Engineering Sciences, Inc. also offers surveying, landscape architecture, environmental services and construction inspection. "I think Julian Oliver [the company's founder] was trying to pick a name that identified its broad-based capabilities." The company began in 1971 as Oliver Engineering before being renamed Associated Engineering Sciences, Inc. in 1980. Reichenbaugh joined the company in 1990 as chief engineer after previously working for the city of Chicago, a private contractor and an automotive manufacturer. "Those jobs gave me a broad-based perspective on what each entity looks for out of engineering," he says. Before coming to AESI, Reichenbaugh was director of engineering for the Prince William County (Md.) Park Authority. "In that role, I was involved in planning, budgeting, design, politics and operations, but after five years, as the park authority grew, things became more specialized," he says. "I wanted to be more broad-based." Structural engineer, Wilford Sheng, P.E., who had joined AESI in 1988, and Reichenbaugh bought the company in 1996. Sheng, who is AESI president, was born in Shanghai, China, and among the first Chinese students allowed to study in the U.S. when Sino-American relations thawed in the 1970s. After purchasing the company, Reichenbaugh says, "We were getting some opportunities in state work, but were always limited by the size of our company and its location. They would tell us we were very qualified, but we wouldn't get any large jobs. That forced us to focus on how to expand. Since Wilford is Chinese, we decided to pursue minority certification." AESI was certified in 2001 as a Maryland Department of Transportation Minority Business Enterprise (MBE) and also as a Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE). "It took three years to complete the certification in Maryland. We're also certified now in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, where the review didn't take as long since it had already been done in Maryland. "As of yet, we haven't seen any true benefit [from certification], although we are getting opportunities to go in as subcontractors for larger firms. Wilford and I aren't promoters so we hired Tom Riford as marketing director. It may take 18 months to two years to see any fruit from the MBE labor." When they bought the company, Reichenbaugh says, "Wilford and I had serious conversations about how we had benefited monetarily over our careers and now it was time to start putting back into the community, to become involved. I'm an introvert, but Wilford is even more so. He took over more engineering to allow me opportunities to go out into the community. "When I started getting involved in 1996, I began with the chamber of commerce to determine what was out there. Joining committees, through evolution, led to chairing committees, then to the board and then executive committee and through these, exposure to other things." In addition to the chamber, Reichenbaugh is a member of the Hagerstown-Washington County Economic Development Commission, the Home Builder's Association, the Greater Hagerstown Committee, the County Engineers Association of Maryland, the county's Public Schools Strategic Planning Committee, the Land Use Committee (which will recommend future uses for Hagerstown's Central Chemical property, 19 contaminated acres which are on the EPA's Superfund list) and chairs the Consolidation of Government Task Force. Already an alumnus of Leadership Hagerstown, in December, Reichenbaugh also completed Leadership Maryland, an eight-month leadership development program for private and public sector executives about the issues and problems affecting Maryland. "We met for two and a half days each month, rotating around the state, with a different topic at each location. We can get isolated here in Hagerstown, perhaps it's the mountains or reading our own newspaper more than the Baltimore Sun, but Leadership Maryland opened my eyes. There are issues out here that are not going away. I was amazed at the extent of drugs in the state, not just as a Baltimore problem but also a local problem. As a state, we also still have a big racial problem. Washington County may only have 8% African Americans but they still have to be treated as true equals." Leadership Maryland also led Reichenbaugh to a personal realization, "The 20-plus committees and boards I was involved with two years ago aren't benefiting anyone. You can't put ten cents worth of time and effort into a lot of things and expect to benefit. You'll be more effective doing fewer things. So you need to pick and choose what's important to you, what's the biggest bang for the buck for the community. I'm going to choose five or six areas and delegate the rest to the staff so the AESI stays involved. "Wilford and I went into community involvement with the idea that this was a completely selfless endeavor. But the outcome was that AESI became more recognized in the community so it also turned out to be a terrific marketing effort too." << back to news