Published January 2004

Reid Middleton embraces ‘challenging projects’

Photo courtesy of Reid Middleton Inc. Reid Middleton’s structural engineers designed the new University of Alaska, Anchorage/Alaska Pacific University Consortium Library, a three-story, 126,000-square-foot building, with a curvy, glass exterior.

By Kimberly Hilden
SCBJ Assistant Editor

Water mains, roadways, marinas and business parks — from Monroe to Lynnwood, Everett to Edmonds, Reid Middleton Inc. has had a hand in all of the above.

“Reid Middleton, over the years, has basically been designing the infrastructure that we have today in Snohomish County,” said Hugh Townsend, president and chief executive of the 50-year-old planning and engineering firm.

Founded in 1953 in Edmonds by Jim Reid, who was soon joined by Leroy Middleton, the company began by providing an array of design, planning and surveying services to meet the needs of its community, Townsend said.

Needs such as the original Edmonds Marina, developed in the 1960s, and Naval Station Everett, for which Reid Middleton conducted site selection studies and provided design work in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Over time, as its staff grew, the firm moved into larger space, first in Lynnwood and then south Everett, and organized those needs into internal divisions of expertise, Townsend said, including waterfront development, surveying and mapping, streets and highways, structural engineering, civil engineering, airport facilities, and planning and permitting.

That expertise has played out in recent years in projects such as:

• The California Street Overcrossing for the Port of Everett, for which Reid Middleton was the lead engineer.
• The Mountain View Business Centre in south Everett, for which the company provided master planning and site utilities services.
• The Tester Road Roundabout in Monroe, which the firm designed for the intersections of Tester Road at Main Street and State Route 522 at Main Street.

The roundabout project, designated Project of the Year for 2002 by the Washington State Chapter of the American Public Works Association, is an example of Reid Middleton’s innovative transportation work, Townsend said.

“Basically, we provided a superior traffic solution to that particular intersection over a signalized intersection solution at a fraction of the cost, a third of the cost that was anticipated for that project,” he said.

For all of the projects Reid Middleton is involved with inside Snohomish County, 90 percent of the company’s workload is outside the county — in the Puget Sound region, across Washington state, extending into the greater Northwest and as far as the Pacific Rim, Townsend said.

Seeing market opportunities, the company, which now has almost 100 employees, opened an office 13 years ago in Anchorage, Alaska, and four years ago in Portland, Ore.

“We felt that our waterfront engineering capabilities were well suited to an Alaska environment that has a lot of waterfront projects and coastline. And at the time, we had some contracts with fishing companies, and so we used that as a springboard to get involved in the Alaska community,” Townsend said.

“We have since turned that into primarily a structural engineering and waterfront engineering office. But we are involved in a much broader range of projects than waterfront,” he added.

One such project is the University of Alaska, Anchorage/Alaska Pacific University Consortium Library, for which Reid Middleton was the lead engineer.

The three-story, 126,000-square-foot building, with its curvy, glass exterior and seismic requirements, is just the type of project the engineering firm seeks out, Townsend said.

“What we want to work on are complex and challenging projects — and we want to provide tangible value to our clients,” he noted.

Since the mid-1990s, Reid Middleton has invested time and money into honing its expertise on seismic engineering practices, even sending engineers to study in Kobe, Japan, which experienced a magnitude 6.9 earthquake in 1995, and Taiwan, which experienced a magnitude 7.6 earthquake in 1999.

The move has paid off with work on such projects as the $125 million seismic retrofit of Anchorage International Airport’s south terminal currently under way, as well as managing the city of Seattle’s earthquake response program in 2001-02, designing and managing the program from the city’s offices, Townsend said.

But with 75 percent of its client base made up by the public sector, Reid Middleton has felt the effects of the slow economy, which has put governmental budgets in a vise, he added.

“Our staff isn’t as large today as it was a year and a half ago,” Townsend said. “But at the same time, work is stable and steady ... and we look to a positive future.”

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