Coastal Engineering Consultants

They might not have realized it at the time, but Michael Stephen and his former business partner could not have chosen a more fortuitous location to pool their talents and establish their company.

Since 1977, when they founded Coastal Engineering Consultants, Inc., Southwest Florida has grown exponentially, requiring expertise in many of the facets of growth — from water and sewer systems, to development planning, road design, and environmental mitigation, including beach restoration.

“We didn’t have the prescience that Southwest Florida was going to grow so fast,” says Stephen, now president of the company, but within a year, they were adding staff to meet demand.

Coastal Engineering was among the first, if not the first in Southwest Florida to blend civil and coastal engineering to focus on estuarine and coastal projects. With Stephen’s expertise in hydrology and geology and Kris Dane’s experience in civil and ocean engineering, the partners focused on projects involving such elements as tidal flow or surface water drainage in the coastal zone. One of their first clients was Charlotte County, which hired them for marine design and maintenance dredging of canals.

“We saw that a lot of the environmental problems were a result of sins of the past, whether you look at the large canal networks that were done in the 60s — cut the canal, drain the swamp, build the road,” Stephen says. That led to problems with water quality and environmental problems and the partners were successful in identifying and designing better methods to complete projects to mitigate and prevent such problems — and to secure permits to complete the projects. They focused on seawalls that were not functioning well, beaches that were eroding, and houses and condominiums that were threatened by eroding shorelines.

Soon, clients were asking them to take on projects in the uplands, so they started diversifying and expanding their services.

Now, Stephen holds the majority share of seven partners in the Naples-based Coastal Engineering, which employs nearly 50 people in three offices. (Several of the partners bought Dane’s share about five years ago.) A Fort Myers office opened about three and a half years ago and a Charlotte County office opened almost a year ago.

The company also has expanded its expertise from civil engineering and coastal hydrology into five divisions — coastal engineering, civil engineering, surveying and mapping, environmental services, and real estate services.

Coastal Engineering’s clients run the gamut, from city and county governments, to state agencies, to an array of development, construction, realty, and agriculture companies among others. It has served such municipalities as Fort Myers Beach, Bonita Springs, and Sanibel as well as Charlotte, Lee, Sarasota, and Collier counties. It also has worked with various utilities.

Some of Coastal’s divisions deal primarily with local projects, but such capabilities as coastal engineering allow it to compete on a much larger scale. The firm might not be in an industry center, but technology enables it to go head-to-head with those firms that are, explains vice president and CFO Dave Weston. “We compete on a global scale.” Coastal has had projects in such areas as the Bahamas and the Middle East. It also was recently short-listed for a World Bank-funded project in Sri Lanka, he adds.

Weston, who has been with the company for 16 years, considers it a very successful company. “We’ve gone through our share of recessions,” he says. “This company has been successful throughout and has managed to continually make profits. Even during the lean years, we’ve managed to stay healthy financially. The client base is very solid and diverse.” That means that demand in one group of clients for certain services might heat up while another cools.

The various divisions were added over the years to meet clients’ needs.

“Part of what you do in a business is not only ‘This is what we do, so come and get it if you want,’ but you keep an eye out on the needs in a community, where there’s a demand that isn’t being met,” Weston says.

The company’s projects are diverse and some are vast and complex, yet most also are interrelated. A client with different needs can find specialized expertise in the firm’s various divisions, but all are connected. “I liken it to an association of doctors,” Weston says. “We specialize in different areas.”

Coastal’s services include subdivision platting, design and permitting, surveying rights-of-way, dock and seawall permitting, marina design, soil and groundwater sampling and remediation, hazardous materials projects, environmental land acquisition, and engineering design for infrastructure and utilities.

The addition of the real estate division and MAI designated real estate appraiser Douglas Dane was a significant boon to the company, Stephen says. That addition allows it to offer property valuation, eminent domain and condemnation valuation, and other services that often go hand-in-hand with municipal projects, developments, mitigation, and others.

The company has another notable boost that has come with the recent hiring of someone with expertise and experience in roadway design, Weston says. The company already offered appraisal services for transportation projects, but the new expert will broaden its services even further. And with the pressing need for new roads, that’s an indisputable asset, he adds.

The nature of its business poses Coastal Engineering with its share of challenges, however.

One of its major frustrations is the regulatory environment. In the company’s early days, Stephen says, the emphasis was less on regulation and more on education as people — both in business and in the state, federal, and local agencies themselves — discovered that certain practices did more damage than good. The Coastal Engineering partners were something of a “fresh voice,” he says, and helped both clients and regulators realize that a different approach could sometimes accomplish a better product.

“At that time, regulations had just reached a new plateau,” Stephen says. “The development industry was just aghast that they were going to have to deal with this, that they couldn’t use the land they had bought” in the ways they had planned. He worked with them and helped them understand that the regulations were not necessarily bad things.

“A lot of what we do is education — educate the client to the value of wetlands and the benefits to them to do things a little differently,” he explains.

For example, a marina project involved two dead-end canals, where water quality was very poor. Coastal Engineering proposed linking the two canals, a novel concept that was rejected at first because it had not been tried before. With more explanation and education, however, the company finally secured the permits and the project succeeded in restoring a healthy water flow to the area, replacing the murky, polluted water.

Now, however, Stephen and Weston complain that the regulatory and permitting agencies overlap and conflict in their jurisdictions, so that meeting requirements can be an exercise in frustration. The company might get approval from one agency for a proposal that doesn’t comply with another. “It becomes a Rubik’s Cube where you turn a corner and you’ve lost the color on the other side,” Weston says. “The permitting process is the biggest unknown when you start a project.”

Another stumbling block is the potential for litigation, particularly in working with public projects. “You’re like the little frog trying to jump across the highway, and even if people don’t mean to target you, you get squashed,” Stephen says.

In fact, Coastal Engineering has been in the headlines in the past few months in relation to a 1996 beach nourishment project in Collier County in which rocks were dredged and pumped onto the beach. That led to angry citizens and pricey efforts to get rid of the rocks and earlier this year, when some Collier County commissioners discovered the county still was doing business with Coastal, they voted to pull the county’s contracts with all of Coastal’s divisions.

In spite of Stephen’s 25-plus years with dredging and nourishment projects, he says, “there’s always risk.” That’s why there’s a clause allowing for changed or unknown conditions in the borrow area, from which the sand was taken. They are expensive projects that draw broad interest and often result in dispute or litigation.

In spite of the rocks, which is not a terribly uncommon occurrence, he says, the project accomplished its purpose. The beach is still there with a “vibrant dune field,” habitat for birds, crabs, and juvenile fish, as well as a shallow slope and sandbar offshore to help protect the beach. “Our design worked,” he says.

“The bottom line is that we’ve tried to stand by the client,” he adds. The company has been up-front in answering questions and working with the client in undertaking the remediation effort to remove the rocks.

Standing by the client is an important part of the corporate culture and philosophy, which revolves around community involvement and respect.

Respect for peers, staff, and clients is “like a mantra around here,” Weston says, and it’s a key to the company’s success because it allows for creative solutions.

“You could say Coastal has always had an interesting cast of characters,” he says with a smile. “We encourage creativity in individuals and that brings people who think out of the box — and they’re respected for that. That challenges us to grow, to get into a new division or branch out.” The firm has no use for “group think” and it tries to simplify processes and keep communication open so proposals don’t have to go through multiple levels of approval.