Otak Transportation Team Expands Breadth of Experience with New Project Manager Meredith Askham
December, 2021
Otak is pleased to welcome Meredith Askham, PM, who joined the transportation team in October. Working previously as a transportation engineering consultant in Denver, CO, Meredith brings years of experience in the field stemming from a career that began with roadway design-build projects in Pueblo, CO.
Meredith describes her early years in design-build as “fast and furious” working on multiple highway construction projects. When she made the switch to more local municipal projects, working for the cities of Idaho Springs, Aurora, Boulder, and Denver, Meredith says “I felt like I was making more of a personal difference to people and the communities. There is a lot of controversy around the giant highway projects. Being able to work on smaller projects that were making a difference on the local level—like bike lane projects throughout the city and county of Denver—was rewarding and fun.”
What drew Meredith to Otak was the size of the firm and the types of projects the multidisciplinary teams were working on. “I had previously been with a huge company. We were getting more and more corporate as the years went by, and I didn’t necessarily like that,” she says. “I liked the size of Otak and the type of projects that the firm was doing was very appealing to me. There were also local municipality jobs and projects in the Louisville, Broomfield, Lafayette, and Boulder area, which is where I live and now work. I was very interested in doing the local jobs.”
Meredith relishes the opportunity to take on transportation work at Otak where she will be able to guide projects from concept through the design phase, providing continuity among the different disciplines as a project manager. With her background in design and construction, Meredith will be able to do some of the design work herself and will be in a great position to effectively communicate with clients. She enjoys this aspect of the work and expresses how “trying to see the client’s needs and wants throughout the project and work those into the design in a cost-effective way is part of the fun. In the end, we are able to deliver a viable plan that the client can move forward into construction with.”
As Meredith further explains, there is a distinct advantage and benefit for municipalities hiring a company like Otak. “The cities don’t necessarily have the time or the resources that we might have to put into a project. Our teams have different backgrounds and have worked in different areas so we can bring ideas from those other areas to their specific project,” she says. Meredith cites bike lane projects as a prime example, stating that “there is a lot of national talk about best practices for these types of projects. We are either already tapped into the research or have already done similar work where we’ve integrated best practices, and we are able to bring that knowledge and experience to a city and see how it could apply to their particular project.”
Meredith and the team will work with a client’s project manager to ensure clear communication and a design process that takes into consideration the specified budget, timelines, and the original intentions of the project. “A lot of times, the city will have gone through a public involvement process where they make commitments to their constituents. The client is relying on us to uphold those commitments in the design,” she states.
If a project has yet to go through the public process, Otak is able to assist with that as well, which is another area that excites Meredith. She says “my favorite part of what I do is being able to get community feedback and implement it in a way that feels personal to those people. We work with the public sector and a lot of times funding is limited. So, being able to deliver a project that people are really happy about, that fits within the budgetary constraints, is rewarding.”