Baton Rouge: Plank-Nicholson BRT

The City-Parish’s first “BRT Project Manager” was Melissa Glascock. She has a bachelor’s degree in engineering and was a project engineer for the City-Parish between 2005 and 2023. After Glascock retired, she was replaced by George Chike in March 2023.

Chike had been a civil engineer for 33 years at the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development before joining the City-Parish. He has a master’s degree in environmental chemistry. He said the key to successfully managing a project is to ask questions, listen, work hard, and follow the rules and regulations. He has had experience managing a wide range of projects including railroad crossings, roadways, dams, levees, and reservoirs, but this is his first FTA-funded project.

The project manager is responsible for overall engineering management and coordination, managing design and construction contracts, and coordination with the city departments, consultants, and the FTA. Chike does not work full-time on the BRT project. He reports to Fred Raiford, the “Project Director” who is responsible for general management, support, and oversight. Raiford is the City-Parish’s director of transportation and drainage, and has a public works background. Chike said that Raiford has little direct involvement with the project, but Chike does keep him updated on its progress.

Chike, along with the consulting firm, Stantec, are responsible for ensuring that the consultants’ and contractors’ work complies with contract provisions, and federal, state and city requirements. They review invoices, monitor budgets, schedule, and quality.

The City-Parish hired Stantec to manage the project on a day-today basis. The Stantec team includes professionals with expertise in program quality assurance, program controls, program utility coordination, public engagement, and construction. Scott Hoffeld of Stantec is the “BRT Program Project Manager,” who reports to Chike and has been delegated extensive responsibilities including coordinating with stakeholders.

Hoffeld has a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s in resource management and administration. He has worked at several consulting firms since 1991 starting with environmental analysis and moving up to a project coordination role, then deputy project manager, project manager, and now a senior project manager. He has worked on numerous transportation projects including highway, transit, seaport, and aviation.

The City-Parish and Stantec manage, review, and coordinate the activities of HNTB, the design consultant. As the designer of record, HNTB facilitates design discussions, develops cost estimates, produces construction documents, and provides support during construction. HNTB also coordinates with the FTA and ensures that its work meets FTA’s requirements. The final design is the 100% completion of all plans, specifications, estimates, special provisions and bid documents.

HNTB brings in planners and engineers from around the country to help with the design. Their team includes professionals with expertise in operations planning, traffic engineering, shelter design, landscape architecture, roadway engineering, transit technology, signal design, electrical engineering, cost estimating, surveying, value engineering, and subsurface utility engineering.

Chris Handzel is HNTB’s design lead, reporting to Hoffeld (at Stantec) and Chike (at the City-Parish). He does not work on this project, full-time. Handzel is the director of transportation planning and policy at HNTB and has been with the firm since 2005. He has a landscape architecture degree and has managed numerous BRT projects out of the firm’s Kansas City office. His work at HNTB has included transit facility design for bus, bus rapid transit, and streetcar projects. He has experience in project management, design charrette facilitation, master planning, conceptual site design, and construction documentation. Handzel said, “Transit agencies lean on us. We can provide guidance based on our experience when agencies embark on new initiatives like their first BRT project.”

Cheri L. Soileau is the project’s “BRT Planning/Operations Lead.” She is the director of planning and program development at CATS where she reports directly to the CEO and has a broad portfolio including responsibility for service planning and capital budgets as well as compliance with DBE and civil rights issues. She started working at CATS in 2020 after approximately 20 years of experience in the transportation industry. She studied history as an undergraduate and has a masters of public administration degree.

Soileau typically only works a few hours a week on the BRT project, but as this project has progressed, she has spent more time on coordination. With the impending construction of the North Transit Center, she anticipates 30 percent or more of her time will be spent with the project along with monitoring the construction of the stations. She has been assertive in protecting and advocating for CATS interests both externally and internally, and doing so before final decisions are made. She said, “it’s hard to pipe up, once design is done.”

Externally, she has pushed for meetings with the City-Parish to stay on top of the project and influence the design of numerous elements such as traffic signal prioritization and station locations. Her goals are to ensure that the new facilities meet CATS’ operating needs and that the BRT proves successful. Internally, she has been pushing the CATS maintenance and operations departments to review plans for the transit center and the bus stops. She has organized trips to take them to Omaha, Kansas City, and Birmingham to learn about other BRT lines. Since CATS has had little experience with capital construction (its facilities are owned by the City-Parish), CATS has urged that the project’s design be simple with off-the-shelf products that are easy to replace.

When Soileau worked at Dallas Area Rapid Transit, one of her responsibilities was preliminary design work for a light rail extension. She credited that experience with helping her to anticipate problems and identify opportunities on the Baton Rouge BRT project. (Her predecessor did not have that experience.) Soileau learned the importance of walking the corridor to identify potential issues, such as lighting, signage, and the effects of inclement weather conditions.

The HNTB team has worked with a wide range of transit agencies. Some are small like CATS with little experience managing large projects and others have capital construction departments with a history of delivering projects. HNTB tailors their advice and services to what the agencies know and don’t know.

Robert Hosack, who served as a deputy project manager for the Baton Rouge project, said, “We don’t need to tell mature agencies how to operate service, if they’ve done it before. But, we do need to educate them about change and trends.”

Smaller agencies, he said, may need more support and education. If they have never undertaken a major project and gone through the federal grant process, “We help them prepare and tell them what they need to do to satisfy FTA’s requirements. Reporting and the sheer amount of information that FTA requires from major capital grantees is often a surprise.”

Another major challenge for smaller agencies is the involvement of the FTA’s project management oversight contractor (PMOC). Hosack said, “We as consultants can explain what will occur when the PMOC comes in, but the agencies don’t fully understand it until they’ve gone through it.” The PMOC team will evaluate projects with a fine-tooth comb and might suggest improving the procedures that agencies have relied upon. For instance, the PMOC expects a more detailed project schedule than most entities have ever seen. “It’s not that the agencies are doing anything wrong, it’s just that the bar is so much higher,” he said. The PMOC will expect to see the schedule for installing a bus shelter to have details from inception to implementation, including details about procurement, mobilization, technology integration, and testing. Hosack said, “If the agencies have never been through it, they can find it overwhelming.”

When a transit agency is not managing the transit project, Hosack said it is important for the agency to closely coordinate with the project sponsor. “Coordination is the focus of every project; some do it better than others. When there are personal relationships and an understanding of what everyone is responsible for, all can work together for the benefit of the project.”

Handzel said that HNTB would like to hire more project managers, especially those with 8 to 10 years of experience. He identified four traits of successful project managers:

• Someone with organizational skills, who can maintain a schedule and budget, and know their status at all times. Project managers need to stay on schedule and task; that is among FTA’s top oversight priorities.
• Technical skills: For designing a BRT project that means an in-depth understanding of both transit planning and design. Few people, Handzel said, can do both. He also said that having a transit operations background is helpful.
• A personality that is outward facing, not a wallflower.
• Someone who can take the bull by the horns and deliver a project.

HNTB has had more success hiring entry level professionals. The firm brings on many individuals with less than five years of experience. Handzel said there are great schools in the Midwest that offer transportation design and planning programs. He said that the current generation is more excited about transit and interested in multi-modal engineering.

While Handzel does not think that an engineering degree is necessary to manage the BRT project, Hosack sees the benefit of having an engineer in charge. He said someone with a planning background can be helpful during the design and construction phases, but he thinks it is better for the project manager to be an engineer or at least have training on design standards and specifications.

HNTB has a learning and development center that offers classes for its employees. Handzel said, “it’s up to us to train employees to become project managers.” He said that HNTB invests in internal training and development opportunities to provide the base of knowledge that is needed and then accelerates the process of turning staff into project managers.

He said, “We find them deputy project manager roles; that’s the best way to train them.” Deputies get on-the job training and are better prepared for the next project. Handzel appreciates HNTB’s philosophy because he took those classes and later served as a deputy project manager. “I had a mentor who brought me to meetings. He taught me how to present myself, how to communicate with the FTA, and what information the FTA was looking for.” Handzel has noticed that smaller transit agencies usually do not have deputy project managers. He also says that project managers in the private sector work in a faster paced environment and have more simultaneous assignments than their public sector counterparts.

Robert Hosack, who served as Handzel’s deputy, also participated in HNTB’s project management training and development programs. While in graduate school, he had an internship at HNTB. Upon graduating in 2012, he started a full-time position at HNTB, where he said, “I was surrounded by a good group of leaders and mentors.” They helped him learn terms, methodologies and exposed him to a variety of work assignments. His primary focus has been transit planning (including service planning, ridership forecasting, corridor planning, and alternatives analysis.)

HNTB offers a wide range of courses including the following:

• Young professionals course (less than 3 years of experience). This two-day course helps new employees learn about HNTB’s three different career tracks (project management, technical experts, people managers).
• Project Management Fundamentals: This 2 ½ day course teaches professionals how to lead a project including managing schedules, budgets, risks, problems, and change orders.

Hosack talked about how it is in HNTB’s interest for transit agencies to have effective project managers. He said, “It’s better to have a counterpart who knows what they’re doing. If you have a good project manager at a transit agency, you don’t worry about getting action items accomplished.” He explained that consulting firms are hesitant about taking on a project that has too much risk. Experienced and talented project managers reduce the risk of projects failing. “We want to succeed, that’s our business,” Hosack said.

When Hoffeld worked at URS, the firm had specific criteria relating to experience and training that had to be met before someone could be a certified URS project manager. The training modules were compliant with the Project Management Institute (PMI) curriculum, which meant that the program incorporated some of PMI’s materials and did not contradict them.

URS did not solely rely upon the determination of an individual’s supervisors. Every region certified its project managers and Hoffeld served on his region’s Project Manager Certification Board. The board served as an independent body and reviewed resumes, and recommendations, and also conducted interviews to determine whether someone was prepared to manage a project. The board had approximately five people, each representing a different discipline. If the board members did not think someone was ready to manage a project, they might recommend additional training modules or taking on a role that would provide needed experience.

Hoffeld admitted that it would be ideal if the BRT project was led by one person who was an architect and a traffic engineer and a transit planner, who also had construction inspection experience. But, he said, those are not even the most important attributes needed to successfully manage the project. Instead, the project manager needs to know how to deal with people and is resourceful, a good communicator, effective coordinator, and well-organized.

He said, “because there are so many plates in the air, keeping people accountable and following up on open items is essential.” He believes that anyone can improve their organizational skills and behaviors. He explained how he sets an example (by taking notes, preparing agendas, sending out action items) that he has seen junior staff follow.

Hoffeld said managers need to have the courage to raise their hands when they don’t know something and ask around for help. He said, “Everything we need to know, someone on the team knows, we just need to make sure to keep people in the loop.” Hoffeld takes on this role for the project and he does this via email and the virtual meetings that he convenes every week or two (depending upon the project phase).

The Project Management Institute, a not-for-profit association, offers training, certificates, and events. To obtain its Project Management Professional (PMP) certification, a project manager must meet certain requirements and then pass a 180question exam. Cheri Soileau once had the PMP certification, but she let it expire. She still refers to the Project Management Body of Knowledge guide that she used to study for the PMP certificate exam. Soileau said the information about schedules, budgets, principles, and project life cycle has been helpful, but not all the PMP-related materials are applicable to transit projects.