Hennepin County Profile
Hennepin County, Minnesota sent this bulletin at 03/01/2016 01:02 PM CST
To learn more about how Hennepin County works for you, the District 3 team conducts a profile series with employees of the county who live in the district. Each month we spotlight a different person from varying departments and occupations. Find out about the day-to-day aspects of occupational fields and work environments at the county, and how each person’s work affects your life.
|
Bruce Spanier |
Describe your work.
When I started at the county, I thought we just built roadways and bridges. The reality is that our corridors include construction of roadways, bridges, walls, bike trails, pedestrian facilities, storm water treatment facilities, and more. We also coordinate with bus rapid transit, and light rail transit. I lead a technician group to support the development of county transportation facility concepts and detailed plans and bid documents for construction of those facilities.
Considerable coordination is required for these facility projects. This includes public involvement, interaction with municipalities and other agencies, coordination with utility owners, and working with property acquisition, construction, environmental services, and other groups.
Input and coordination from all these groups is necessary to ensure that a safe, durable, and efficient transportation facility can be economically constructed in timely fashion. Our projects need to limit impacts to adjacent property owners, provide access to properties, provide utility services, control pollution and sediment run-off, and maintain safe vehicular and pedestrian traffic routes during construction.
What part of your job do you find most challenging?
Getting project corridor stakeholders with varied interest to concur on a facility design that will serve all corridor users can be difficult. Stakeholders include motorists, pedestrians, bicyclists, truck drivers, property owners, business owners, utility owners, schools, transit, the US Post Office, environmentalists, and others. We invite input from all, but need to balance everyone’s interests as needed to provide a safe project that is delivered on time and on budget.
The addition of transit, bike lanes, and pedestrian considerations to county corridors has been controversial as motorists and property owners may object to inclusion of these elements in our projects. The County is investing in providing comprehensive roadway corridor for all users and needs to plan for the future, not just current usage.
What do you find most enjoyable?
Watching the projects progress through the construction process and seeing the final product emerge is incredibly rewarding. Hennepin County transportation projects take considerable effort to get from the concept stage to the final product that the public can use and enjoy, but seeing concept become reality always makes it worth the effort.
What is one thing everyone should know about the work you do?
Most of our project designs are actually modeled in a computer to assist with our detailed construction plan development. A three-dimensional model of the transportation corridor is created with software, literally a virtual roadway corridor. This helps to define the limits of our project grading activity and helps make sure new corridor components match into existing streets, driveways, etc. It also helps with our storm sewer and other utility design, and helps us develop quantities for bid documents and budget purposes. Most people would be surprised to find out that we’ve digitally constructed the project to address potential conflicts. As I’ve said, there are an incredible amount of components in construction projects, and we plan and coordinate using software to make sure everything will go to plan.
Bruce Spanier is a resident of the Bronx Park neighborhood in St. Louis Park, and is a Supervising Engineering Technician in the Design Division of Public Works Transportation Department. Public Works engages communities by enacting sustainable solutions to advance the quality of life and livability in Hennepin County.
|
||||||||||||||
