Has Los Angeles County lost its engineering mojo?
The Feb. 28 announcement by Parsons Corp. that it moved its headquarters from Pasadena to Centreville in Northern Virginia means that in just three years, two of Los Angeles County’s three engineering firms with multibillion-dollar annual billings have left the region.
In 2016, Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. moved its headquarters from Pasadena to Dallas. Only Century City-based AECOM still calls L.A. County home.
The circumstances around each company’s headquarters departure and the immediate impact are different.
Jacobs, the larger of the two companies with $15 billion in revenue last year and 77,000 global employees, decided on Dallas as a cost-saving move after a nationwide site selection process. Many of the 300 employees at the Pasadena headquarters, including C-suite executives, made the move. At the time, Jacobs Chief Executive Steven Demetriou said the company would keep roughly 1,500 employees in the Southern California region.
Parsons, which posted $3.6 billion in revenue last year and has 16,000 global employees, had planned to move its headquarters to the greater Washington, D.C., area to be closer to its largest concentrations of both employees and clients. For the time being, however, Parsons is keeping its 500 Pasadena employees in place − at least until the lease on that building, its now former headquarters, runs out in seven years.
Once the lease runs out and Parsons’ current projects in the Los Angeles area wind down, it’s uncertain whether Parsons will maintain its level of commitment to the local market. The company is currently working on designs for the Metro Purple Line subway extension and program management for the $5.5 billion plan to improve rail and vehicular access to Los Angeles International Airport.
Still, Los Angeles County remains a major talent center for engineers. It’s home to the largest number of engineering graduates in the nation − 70,000 according to a 2013 report − and three of the nation’s top engineering schools: Caltech, USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering and the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science at UCLA.
That talent pool that should offset most of the negative impacts from businesses leaving the region, said Yannis Yortsos, Viterbi School’s dean. And for engineering graduates, the influx of startup technology firms into Los Angeles has expanded opportunities.
“There’s such a diverse array of opportunities now with all the tech companies coming here that the moves should have minimal impact,” Yortsos said.
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United to Build LAX Hangar
Chicago-based United Airlines Inc. has broken ground on its $352 million, 407,000-square-foot aircraft hangar and maintenance facility at Los Angeles International Airport, which the company will use to service its aircraft fleet.
Once completed, the two connected buildings will include a ground-service equipment and facilities-maintenance building, and a line maintenance hangar. There will also be an engine support shop that will focus on the airline’s Dreamliner fleet, manufactured by Chicago-based Boeing Co. United expects to complete the project by late next year.
United chose Century City-based AECOM’s Hunt Construction Group as the prime contractor and Oklahoma City-based Frankfurt-Short-Bruza Associates as lead architect. AvAirPros Inc., of Naples, Fla., is providing project management services.
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AECOM’s Kansas City Airport Bid Likely Dead
An AECOM-led consortium’s last-ditch effort to bid on a $1.5 billion terminal project at Kansas City International Airport appears to have failed.
On Feb. 28, the Kansas City Council approved construction and related agreements for a joint venture team led by Edgemoor Infrastructure and Real Estate, a unit of Bethesda, Md.-based Clark Construction Group.
AECOM’s group had earlier lost out when the city entered exclusive negotiations with the Edgemoor-led consortium in 2017, but those negotiations got bogged down late last year amid concerns from councilmembers about cost overruns. Three councilmembers sought more input from the AECOM-led partnership, raising hopes for the Century City-based company that it might get a second shot at the contract.
But the negotiations with Edgemoor appeared to get back on track last month, leaving the AECOM consortium out in the cold.
Staff reporter Howard Fine can be reached at [email protected] or (323) 556-8327.
