BRIDGEPORT - Civil & Environmental Consultants, a full-service consulting en­gineering firm with locations across the nation, employs a diverse staff of more than 100 at its Bridgeport office.

Each member of the CEC team has an equal stake in the firm's success, as the compa­ney is owned and operated by its employees, said Dennis Miller, vice president and office lead.

"We're different. There is no other organization around that is like CEC," he said. "We're different because we don't have a single owner. All of us own part of the business; we are all owners. There's no one guy in charge; we're all pulling the rope together. It's a really different concept of business where you don't have the tra­ditional owner setup."

This unique business model means that individuals work­ing on projects out in the field are the same people respon­sible for the company's over­ all direction, said Steven Cain, vice president and civil practice lead.

"They are engineers, sur­veyors; they're ecologists. The people who do the work are the people who run the company;" he said. "That's a little differ­ent."

Employees are required to be multifaceted and to contribute to all aspects of the company's operations, Cain said.

"Every person in the compa­ny has a responsibility to mar­ket, and everyone in the com­pany has a responsibility to do actual work," he said. "It's all based off of your level and your experience. Even down to our lowest level technician, we want everyone to feel responsi­ble because we are an employ­ee-owned company. The better we do as a company, the better we all do individually and fi­nancially."

The firm's highly skilled workforce is capable of han­dling many different types of projects, Miller said.

"We can take our clients project from concept to completion," he said. "In this building, we have planning; we have surveying, geotechnical engineering, structural engineering, construction inspection, wastewater and utility ... every single aspect of the consulting business we do in-house."

Civil & Environmental Con­sultants operates more like a large family than a traditional corporate firm, Cain said.

"We provide a happy at­mosphere," he said. "Once a month we have a social get-to­ gether after work, just to have pizza or hors d'oeuvres.

In the summertime, we have a monthly picnic out in the parking lot that is catered. We allow our employees to attend sporting events; we have sea­son tickets to WVU games and Fairmont State games. We try to encourage our employees to be a part of the office. There's nothing worse than not liking where you work. Coming to work every morning when you're not happy isn't a good thing. So we try to create an atmosphere where everyone is happy but we still get the work done and get it done properly." CEC's Bridgeport office first opened in 2012 as a very small operation, Cain said.

"This office opened up with three people," he said. "Since 2012, we've grown to over 100. We're at 110 right now, with projections this year to add maybe another 25. We'd like to be, by the end of the year, at 125 or 130 people. This is a good area to be growing in. There is a lot of industry that we service."

Behind Civil & Environ­mental Consultants' corporate headquarters in Pittsburgh, the·Bridgeport office is the largest and fastest growing of the firm's 23 locations, Cain said.

"We're really the second largest office in our company," he said. "Our cooperate offices in Pittsburgh are probably in the 300 to 350 range of staff. We are probably growing faster than any office in the company."

The company plans to focus on expanding into handling public sector work, doing projects for municipalities, utili­ty companies and public ser­vice districts, over the course of 2019, Cain said.

"We're putting the team in place. We've made some key hires over the last three to four months to help build that public sector group to really push to get water and wastewater type work with public utilities and municipalities," he said. "That type of work is a piece of the site development work we do as well, so it goes hand in hand with a lot of the other work that we do."

Civil & Environmental Con­sultants' office is located at 600 Marketplace Ave., Suite 200, in Bridgeport.

For more information, call 304-933-3119 or visit ce­cinc.com.