April 2023 Vol. 78 No. 4
Features
Orlando’s Richard Howard brought global view, acclaim to innovative public works program
A fifth-generation Floridian who based his entire career in-state might seem an unlikely candidate to bring international perspective and recognition to a municipal public works department, but it was a natural path for Richard Howard.
An early interest in engineering and aviation led to a civil engineering degree from the University of Central Florida and a first job at Pan Am World Services, which managed construction and maintenance of U.S. Air Force facilities from the eastern seaboard through the southern Atlantic Ocean.
Based out of Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Howard’s work spanned oceans, continents and diverse projects involving most facets of facility construction and rehabilitation, from structural analysis and design to paving and drainage systems. When not at work, he used flight benefits to travel the world, visiting civil engineering sites at every turn.
After seven years with Pan Am, he brought that experience to Orlando’s Public Works department in 1985 as the assistant chief of its Streets and Drainage Bureau. His career grew along with the fast-expanding city. He took over Streets and Drainage as bureau chief in 1989 and became city engineer four years later. His success in that high-visibility assignment led to his appointment as director of Public Works in 2011.
During his tenure, Orlando’s Public Works department was increasingly known for its innovative, sometimes experimental and largely successful approaches to wastewater and stormwater management. By his retirement in April 2022, the inveterate traveler who continued to study civil projects around the world, had helped build systems that regularly attracted international visitors seeking to learn from Orlando’s unique experiences.
Capping his municipal career, Howard was honored with the underground infrastructure industry’s 2023 Most Valuable Professional Award. He sat down with UI to discuss his career and share a few lessons learned over 37 years in public works.
UI: How did you first become interested in engineering? Does it run in the family?
Howard: Yes, actually, it does. My father owned an electrical contracting business in Orlando and, although he wasn’t an engineer, it was relevant work. I used to go up and spend summers with my grandparents in Marietta (Ga.), where my grandfather was an aeronautical engineer at Lockheed. He designed airframes for different models. The C-111 was one of them, and I think he worked on that for a lot of his career. He would take me to work with him sometimes, and I got to see what was going on there, and that interested me. I think that experience stayed with me, even though I ended up studying civil engineering.
When I got to college, engineering just seemed like the logical thing for me to do. I was always pretty good with math. I actually wanted to major in physics, but I found out that you really couldn’t make any money doing that. So I thought, you know, engineering is a practical application of that.
UI: With that background, it makes sense that you would start at Pan Am. Is it fair to assume that aviation was part of the attraction, even though you worked on facilities?
Howard: It was kind of kind of the best of a couple of different worlds. The work was interesting, and we got flight benefits, so we were gone every weekend someplace. I could have gone and done some consulting and probably made a lot more. But it was the travel opportunities that really kept me there.
They just happened to own the contract with the Air Force to maintain the Eastern Test range, and the work was maintaining operations all the way down to Pretoria, South Africa. If we weren’t on a plane going someplace fun, we were doing work on Ascension Island or Grand Turk or some other place downrange a lot.
It was easy to get standby seats in those days. If you wanted to fly domestic first class, you could do it for 25 bucks. And if you wanted to fly international first class, it was $50. I went as far and as often as I could possibly go. I think I’m only missing one continent, and that’s Antarctica.
UI: As a young civil engineer traveling abroad, were you taking in the different engineering approaches along the way?
Howard: Yes, I’ve seen a lot of wastewater treatment plants all over the world. And dams and bridges. Those are things that always interested me.
UI: It sounds like you landed a perfect first job. What led you to give that up for a landlocked public works job?
Howard: There were a couple of reasons, actually. First, I had a very good friend who was running the Streets and Stormwater Section in Orlando. The other reason was the federal Deficit Reduction Act of 1984 (laughs). As part of that legislation, they were going to start taxing our flight benefits. I thought, “Hmm, this might be a good time to jump ship,” because I figured out my flight benefits at market rate – which is what they were going to tax – would have been more probably than I was making. So, it was not a difficult decision, even though I loved the work, and I did things there that I’ll never do again. I took my last trip to Germany, and when I came back, I started December 31st. Then took the next day off. And I’ve been here ever since – or, at least, until last April.
UI: Of course, Disney was already there, but Orlando has seen enormous growth since you started working for the city in 1985.
Howard: Absolutely. We had a rather aggressive planning department that liked to annex and grow bigger and bigger and bigger. Then the city’s population, because of Disney’s growth, really swelled over the years to well over 300,000. Because we have so many visitors here at one time, our infrastructure got a little overtaxed for the size of city that we were, because we had to provide services for all the visitors.
UI: I suppose the long-range planning required for Disney and other tourism expansions helped Orlando see ahead and get its infrastructure in place in time?
Howard: That’s true. Fortunately, we also had a (city) administration that recognized those things and did try to plan ahead. We tried to grow the infrastructure in places where we knew there was going to be growth and development.
UI: That helps explain how you grew to a CapEx budget of $300 million and 630 employees during your tenure.
Howard: That’s right, although I think that was at its peak. We had ebbs and flows. I think by the time I left, it was a little bit less than 620, but that was because of all the vacancies. We had positions we just couldn’t keep filled.
UI: When we think about constructing and maintaining wastewater and stormwater infrastructure in Florida, hurricanes and sinkholes come to mind. Were there unique challenges to public works in your region?
Howard: Sinkholes were always an issue, not so much in the city but outside the city, there’s a lot of limestone formations. Really, all of Florida is pretty much limestone formations. And with stormwater you get a lot of the acidity and it dissolves limestone. Once it dissolves any kind of bridge, things can just collapse. But we didn’t have to deal with that too much. We had one that actually affected one of our major pumping stations.
Beyond that, we get over 50 inches of rain a year, and some of those thunderstorms can be rather intense. What happens is we get a deluge and then we’ve got to deal with flood waters. We’re flat, so there’s not a lot of elevation change, and in a lot of cases the drain-off isn’t fast enough as there’s just no place to put it. And, of course, we get hurricanes and tropical storms that can really test our systems and crews. We have a well-developed emergency operations center that I’ve spent more than a few nights at. We have some unique challenges, but mostly it’s what anybody else would have to deal with.
UI: You mentioned a sinkhole at one of your pump stations, which brings to mind some unique water recycling projects that have drawn a lot of attention.
Howard: Yes, as a matter of fact, that pump station is part of a system we designed to take treated effluent from Orlando to West Orange County. We have a very, very large pumping system that takes our water and supplies a golf course and a lot of the citrus growers out there. That’s known as the Conserv II system, and it was very unique at the time it was built.
We developed a reputation for experimentation. We’ve had a lot of people from literally all over the world come to see some of the things that we were doing. We tried a lot of things, and some certainly worked better than others. But I think for the most part, we took water quality very seriously. On the wastewater side, we have three treatment plants that do about 40 mgd (million gallons per day). And our after-treatment systems like Conserv II, I think, are rather unique.
UI: Your Eastern Wetlands Reclamation Project was another major after-treatment project. Was that the first of its kind?
Howard: Right. That involves pumping treated effluent out to a 1,650-acre site in East Orange County to create a man-made wetland. The Iron Bridge treatment plant had been discharging reclaimed water directly into a river, and the nutrient levels were above EPA regulations. Our studies showed a wetlands treatment system could solve the problem, but there was nothing of that scale anywhere else to serve as an example. We pioneered that project over 25 years ago, and now it’s designated as a park and a conservation area. People from all over come there to birdwatch. It’s an experiment that worked.
UI: Did any of that innovation make its way into other areas?
Howard: Yes, we’ve done some created wetlands on the stormwater side, too. For instance, we’ve experimented with packed-bed filters where we’ve taken some of the wastewater technology and adapted to stormwater. It’s a kind of a treatment system where we allow water to enter and then flow across the bed and is collected on the other side after it’s filtered through some filter media and aquatic plants. It provides nutrient removal prior to its outfall into one of our local lakes. Then during dry weather conditions, we had the capability of pumping water out of the lake and through the system to remove some of the nutrients that way.
UI: Of course, innovations like these over the course of your career factored into your MVP Award. Looking back, what would you say is the biggest change from your early days at Orlando?
Howard: We’ve seen a dramatic increase in regulations. The wastewater regulations have been pretty much in place for a while, but stormwater is not too far behind.
UI: It might be hard to pick specific lessons learned from your long career, but what would you pass along to other public works and water management leaders?
Howard: You know, I really believe that people are lucky to work for administrations that recognize that infrastructure needs to be maintained and expanded when it’s necessary. I’m sure you’re aware of the ASCE report that comes out every few years about infrastructure, and the grades are really low. I think we have to take that seriously. I just don’t think the funding follows that as much as it needs to.
We all know money is tight, and the work we do is not the glamorous stuff. But it’s not very glamorous when something fails, either. It’s kind of forgotten infrastructure, and when it fails, it fails big. I would urge everyone to demand funding, because the failures are going to show up sooner or later.
UI: Any tips on how to accomplish that, or is it just persistence?
Howard: For me it was persistence and trying to make friends with the finance director. And I think that really paid off. Bring it up to commissioners and your mayor and make sure they’re aware of these things. A good time to do that is after you’ve had a major failure that really illustrates the need. Like, last August we had a storm here – it wasn’t my problem, because I already retired – but downtown literally was flooded here for weeks. That’s the kind of thing that you point to and say: “Look, this is what can happen, and does happen, and you need to pay attention.” UI
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