Our Services
Conterra Engineering is here to own your project through every stage of the process – from concept to completion. Conterra brings over 30 years of combined experience, offering personalized service and technical expertise.
Site Evaluation & Development
Ensuring an efficient site design is crucial for project success. We review the site layout early in the development phase to avoid conflicts and optimize the site. Our process includes a detailed review of civil engineering design, existing conditions, and planned encumbrances to prevent surprises during final design, permitting, and construction. Key factors we review are:
Existing Conditions Review: Reviewing surveys, topography, environmental assessments, and recorded maps to ensure accurate and reliable design inputs.
Site Constraints: Identifying and evaluating site limitations early in the design process.
Floodplains and Wetlands: Assessing these areas to optimize site layout and address limitations.
Soils: Understanding soil properties with geotechnical testing to enhance construction and maintenance cost-efficiency.
Civil Design: Providing preliminary designs for grading, drainage, erosion control, utilities, road alignment, permitting support, and other related designs.
Full-Service Civil Engineering
Our core service is acting as the engineer of record, creating all necessary plans and reports for civil permitting and construction. We start by ensuring early-stage development and site evaluation are properly vetted. From there, we produce all required documents, including:
Permitting and Construction Plans: These documents are pivotal in our process, and we take immense pride in ensuring they are clean, concise, and effective. Accurately illustrating our design is paramount to project success. We develop these plans to meet the diverse requirements of clients, contractors, and reviewers. This includes detailed layouts for grading, drainage, erosion control, utilities, road alignment, and other essential civil site components.
Reports: Providing essential reports like SWPPPs, SPCCs, drainage reports, H&H reports, utility reports, and specifications.
Procurement Services: For clients who prefer a single point of contact for their subconsultants, Conterra can assemble a complete team by procuring vetted subconsultants who understand and meet our strict requirements.
Entitlements & Permitting
Entitlements and permitting are significant hurdles to a project’s progress. Our team’s decades of experience navigating various municipalities ensure your project proceeds as planned. Effective entitlement and permitting services streamline timelines and reduce legal and regulatory obstacles. Entitlement services involve obtaining necessary approvals from local authorities, including navigating zoning regulations, securing land use permits, conducting environmental impact assessments, and ensuring compliance with all regulations. Collaborating with permitting authorities at all levels is crucial for final construction approvals, and we pride ourselves on streamlining this process, working closely with reviewers to expedite approvals and keep the project on schedule.
Construction Services
Maintaining close collaboration between our team and the contractor is pivotal for the success of the project. We possess the requisite knowledge to facilitate efficient construction and readily offer our support for any engineering-related needs. Providing prompt and thoughtful responses to any contractor RFIs and inquiries is crucial to ensuring the seamless progression of the project. We also prioritize getting our team of engineers out to the site during construction. We conduct regular site visits, observation reports, and recommendations to our clients from our site visits. This proactive approach is critical to a project’s successful completion.
Technical Capabilities
In civil site design and development, project success requires meticulous evaluation and technical proficiency across various domains. Our approach ensures project integrity and resilience from inception to completion. The following sections outline our technical capabilities, systematic methodologies, proactive challenge mitigation, and commitment to precision, resilience, and sustainability.
| Grading and Earthwork Adapting the site layout is pivotal to minimize the need for grading, reduce or eliminate the quantity of imported or exported soils, and limit exposure to erosion. Optimizing these elements can significantly decrease the cost of construction, mitigate challenges associated with reseeding and stabilizing extensive sites, and reduce the risk of erosion affecting the surrounding environment. | Erosion and Sediment Control Managing erosion and sediment control can be the most challenging phase of construction, especially for sites with extensive footprints. This task gains added significance when the site is in proximity to wetlands, impaired waterways, or other environmentally sensitive areas. Engaging an experienced civil engineering consultant for such sites is crucial for ensuring environmental compliance and project efficacy. |
| Drainage Proper planning for stormwater conveyance, detention, and flooding is crucial to avoid significant problems and delays. Our team of experts can provide reports and calculations for any sized project, from typical drainage reports to large-scale hydrology and hydraulics (H&H) reports. We offer preliminary or in-depth results for stormwater flow rates, imperviousness, storage, water quality treatment, flood modeling, inundation, velocity, scour, and more. | Road Alignment Designing roads entails the consideration of numerous factors, including vehicle type, access, safety, signage, visibility, maintenance, and longevity. It is imperative that roads are designed both horizontally and vertically to ensure optimal functionality and safety. Additionally, we collaborate with the project geotechnical engineer to deliver pavement sections that are tailored to meet the specific needs of both the client and the site, avoiding overdesign and eliminating unnecessary costs. |
| Entitlements Entitlement services secure local authority approvals for development, including zoning, permits, environmental assessments, and regulation compliance. They also handle community outreach, public concerns, and stakeholder coordination for smooth approvals. | Permitting Collaborating with permitting authorities at all levels is indispensable for securing final approvals for construction. We take pride in our ability to streamline this process, engaging closely with reviewers as needed, to expedite approvals and keep the project on schedule. |
| Subcontracting We have a curated list of trusted subconsultants we regularly work with. For clients who prefer to have one main point of contact, we can subcontract multiple services, including surveying, environmental, geotechnical, electrical, structural, landscape architecture, and more. | Project Management With years of experience in project management and team leadership, we excel at creating realistic timelines, meeting deadlines, and communicating effectively with key stakeholders. |
| Utilities Essential components such as waterlines, sanitary and storm sewers are pivotal to ensuring a project functions as intended. Our team of professional engineers possesses extensive experience in designing these systems, tailoring them to meet the specific requirements of each project. | Coordination Synchronized collaboration across all project disciplines is essential to prevent costly design errors and save time. We foster close relationships with engineers, contractors, architects, owners, and other relevant parties, ensuring the project stays on schedule and objectives are seamlessly achieved. |