MANKATO — About 40 years of municipal engineering experience exited Mankato’s Public Works Department in recent months, leaving city leaders looking for replacements in an era where civil engineers can be hard to find.
The highest profile absence — Public Works Director and City Engineer Jeff Johnson — is a temporary one.
“Upon his return, Jeff Johnson will resume his role as director of Public Works,” said Paul David, the city’s communications director.
While city officials aren’t officially stating the reason for Johnson’s leave of absence or its length, he is a longtime member of the U.S. Army Reserve and the word “deployment” was used at a council meeting when discussing the matter.
The natural fill-in option while Johnson is gone — Assistant City Engineer Michael McCarty — wasn’t an option. McCarty, with more than 15 years of tenure with the city, accepted in September the top spot in Watonwan County, where he was hired as public works director and county engineer.
In addition, Jon Nelson left Mankato this spring to become assistant city engineer of Lakeville. A Burnsville native, Nelson said on an introductory video on Lakeville’s Facebook page that he was excited to join a fast-growing community closer to his hometown. Nelson said he had spent five years in Mankato, most recently supervising the city’s engineering division.
Mankato is turning to consulting engineering firm Bolton & Menk to cover Johnson’s absence and oversee the variety of infrastructure projects underway across the city.
Karl Keel, who worked for 17 years as the director of public works for the city of Bloomington before joining Bolton & Menk in September, has been named Mankato’s interim public works director.
“Keel has worked in similar roles in the cities of Shoreview and Roseville, as well as at the consulting firm BRW,” David said.
It’s far from uncommon to see consulting engineers working with the municipal Public Works staff on projects. That was already happening on high-profile projects such as the modernization of the regional sewage treatment plant, repair to flood-damaged city parks and the coming reassembly and placement of the historic Kern Bridge across the Blue Earth River between Mankato’s Sibley and Land of Memories parks.
“Often, it’s because they have a certain expertise required for a particular project,” David said of the contracts with private engineering firms.
Even with the outside help, City Manager Susan Arntz suggested during a recent City Council meeting that she wasn’t inclined to add any non-emergency construction projects to the “to do” list of the Public Works Department right now.
Regarding a council member’s desire to see a municipal splash pad moved up on the city’s construction agenda, Arntz spoke of the need to find consensus on a location but also referenced the staff shortage.
“Without having an engineer in the Public Works Department …,” she said, suggesting that discretionary projects might have to take a back seat.
As for getting the positions of McCarty and Nelson filled, it’s similar to the ongoing struggle to find qualified police officers to fill openings in the Public Safety Department.
“We have the same issue with engineering,” Arntz said.
There’s a widespread shortage of civil engineers in America, according to David, who pointed to a report by the American Society of Civil Engineers. That report noted that simple demographics — the retirement of engineers in the baby boom generation — was a primary cause. The generations that followed the boomers were smaller and they’ve increasingly been less inclined to enter the architecture, engineering and construction fields.
“Students who might otherwise have become civil engineers instead pursued careers in other engineering disciplines or other fields entirely,” stated a 2023 article on the topic in the society’s Civil Engineering Magazine.
The article, quoting the president of a private engineering firm, noted that college students can find quicker, less demanding paths to wealth: “Anecdotally, people who are smart enough to become engineers are also smart enough in general to do a degree in finance.”
Some private firms say they are losing engineers to the public sector because those jobs require less travel and shorter work weeks than consulting engineering, according to the article. At the same time, Mankato Human Resources Director Sheila Huber said private engineering firms can offer young engineers higher pay and more enticing work environments.
“They have fancier tools. They have fancier projects,” Huber said.
Recruiting for the open positions is underway even as the city’s remaining engineers and technicians share the workload with consulting engineers.
In competing with the private sector for potential employees, there may be some tactics the city can’t match. Engineering firms mentioned in the Civil Engineering Magazine article are offering recruiting and retention incentives that include a paid week off at Christmas, and one company holds three-day team-building getaways, with engineers’ families invited, where pizza-making courses and whisky-tasting events are among the activities.
The same company also holds events, described as both fun and informative, for employees at a ballistics lab that involve “teaching in the morning, blowing stuff up in the afternoon!”