Ready for Take-Off

Ready for Take-Off

By Sean Roth

Real Estate Editor

It's a well-known problem: It's clear that a bird habitat on an airport is a bad situation - birds and planes don't mix. But with environmental laws requiring a collection area for stormwater drainage, there didn't seem to be any way around the stormwater ponds, which obviously, attract birds.

The MEA Group Inc., a small Lakewood Ranch aviation engineering, consulting and construction company thinks it has the problem tackled - good news for the industry and for the company's profits.

The MEA Group is nearing completion on a study for the Florida Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration that will suggest eliminating stormwater ponds on airports and create new rules for water management on the sites. The eventual cost savings to airports in removing the pond requirements could equate to hundreds of millions of dollars. Aside from future business with the state, a well-done, persuasive study also would give the MEA Group a major leg up on future airport construction and planning work statewide, and possibly nationally, too.

"This is something the industry has been trying to get for a while," says Fred Piccolo president and CEO of Sarasota Bradenton International Airport, which used the MEA Group for its Development of Regional Impact. "We have been trying to prove that the level of contamination is far less for a runway than for the same miles of a roadway. There needs to be a much different standard. Some people might worry this is just another industry trying to get out of the rules, but this is not the case."

Piccolo added that for the MEA Group, "saying you helped write rules is a good selling point."

G. Kelly Rubino, principal of the MEA Group, is cautiously optimistic about the impact of the stormwater report.

"Yes, it is a good edge; now we have to capitalize on it," he says. "Some firms will pick this up quickly. We are going to go to other states with our data. This is a problem nationwide. We need get out in front on this and run a little faster."

In many ways, the MEA Group is a Cessna trying to compete in an Airbus world. In pure employment numbers, the 20-person MEA Group is out-matched; competitors include HNTB Cos., Columbia, S.C.-based The LPA Group Inc. and Kimley-Horn and Associates Inc. Kimley-Horn alone can reach into its 2,000 person staff for a project. To compete, the MEA Group specializes exclusively on aviation work.

"Most of our competitors have expanded into other arenas for diversity," explains Rubino, principal owner of the MEA Group. "They have a lot of resources to work with. We think we're better off just focusing on airport demand. Unlike in the private sector, you can generally count on the fact that they can afford to pay the bill."

To spread some of its risk, Rubino has continued to grow the 14-year-old company's services and geographic coverage area.

"Our targets are small- to medium-sized airports," Rubino says. "We can pretty much do anything an airport would need us to do, but we try to focus on the uninhabited portions of the airport. If our clients needs an office complex, we usually team up with a company that specializes in that."

Design and build

Last year, Rubino and his partners took the engineering/consulting business one step further with the creation of MEA Constructors Inc., an independent construction company that Rubino says has greater upside but also additional risks. The construction business employs an additional 20 people.

"Where the MEA Group will typically grow by a reliable 5% to 10% a year, the construction end has the potential to grow 15% to 20% a year," Rubino says. "The potential there is huge. The risk on the construction end comes in finding bonding and challenges of workmen's comp. It also has different liability issues."

The biggest future market the construction company offers the MEA Group is design-build. In general, design-build projects cut out the competitive-bid process for airport authorities and use one company to handle the entire scope of developing a structure.

Design-building in aviation was virtually unheard of until five years ago, and for many aviation organizations, the standard bidding process is still preferred. Speaking in general about the process Piccolo, and Noah Lagos, airport director for the St. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport, emphasized that the time savings offered by design-build were more important in the process because of government grant timing constraints.

MEA Group's first design-build job is the redevelopment of the Charlotte County Airport. The $20-million development included demolishing more than 25 buildings that were devastated by Hurricane Charley, and constructing a number of new buildings in their place, including a 25,000-square-foot terminal, 120 T-Hangers for single plane storage and multiple bulk hangers. The project will also include redoing the airfield electrical system, and building some commercial space.

In the beginning

Rubino first got started in aviation civil engineering after being discharged from the U.S. Army Corp. of Engineers in the early '70s. At a Christmas party he bumped into an executive who worked at Allegheny Airlines, a defunct airline whose assets are now owned by U.S. Airways. That meeting led to a job with the airline working in engineering.

"Let's say Newark wanted to build a new terminal," Rubino says. "It was my job to tell them what we as company needed. I did this for a couple dozen airports."

Then Rubino took a position as director of engineering for the Greater Pittsburgh International Airport as it developed a new terminal facility. In the early 1980s, Rubino took a similar position working for the Charleston International Airport in Charleston, S.C.

In 1986, Rubino went to work for a transportation-consulting company that wanted to expand into Florida. Rubino opened the company's first Florida office in Tampa.

"I wanted to open my own company or to be a partner in that one," Rubino says. "Unfortunately, the owners and I had a difference of opinion over that."

As Rubino and his friend, Bill Hakos, were starting to put together the pieces of a new business, they got a call from a business broker.

"He said there was an opportunity to buy a well-respected Sarasota engineering firm," Rubino says. "The owner had decided to retire and wanted to sell it."

The rub in the deal was it was a completely different company from the aviation-consulting business Rubino and Hakos envisioned. The company was Mosby Engineering Associates Inc., and it designed commercial complexes and golf course communities, including Venice Golf and Country Club, The Oaks and Center Gate.

"We thought it would be easier to buy a company that had a reliable business and then change the focus rather than starting from scratch," Rubino says.

"We tried doing the general development work for a while, but I just didn't like it," Rubino says. "We probably could have kept the business the way it was. But part of the reason I got into aviation was I loved working with airlines and working on airports."

As Rubino and Hakos transformed Mosby into more of an aviation-centered engineering/consulting firm, the original name was just shortened, and the MEA Group Inc. was born. In 2000, Hakos retired and Rubino bought out his interest in the company.

It wasn't chance that led Rubino to concentrate three of the company's five offices in Florida. They're located in Lakewood Ranch, West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale. The state government views airports as economic generators, Rubino says, and the Florida Department of Transportation spends the money to keep them going.

"Florida has the biggest state program," Rubino says. "The state DOT spends more than $100 million a year toward airport grant projects, more than all the other states excluding Texas and maybe California."

The company has added offices in Baltimore and Knoxville, Tenn., and is also working in Richmond, Va., and Rhode Island.