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State Street Area Sidewalk Renovations

Adrian Iraola, Project Director  

Adrian Iraola loves his work. When he talks about curbs, he smiles. When he  talks about concrete,  he grins. And when he talks about scoring concrete, he just can’t contain his excitement.  

As a civil engineer trained in Mexico’s prestigious National Polytechnic  Institute, Adrian has worked extensively in residential, civil, and commercial  construction for over thirty years. He has done buildings and airports, sewers and sidewalks, parking lots and even his own home. When he’s on vacation,  Adrian cannot help but examine other civil engineering projects. When he was in Newport  Beach last year, he just had to stop his car and check out a street paving project at a marina. "It was so beautiful; everything fit just perfectly." He says in his lightly accented,  lilting voice, "I’d give it a ten out of ten."  

Adrian has worked for the City of Ann Arbor for the past twenty-two years. He started by doing the sidewalks around the Water Treatment Plant on Pomona and has come to be the man the city calls when it has a major civil engineering project to manage. Adrian was in charge of the award-winning work on the Ann Arbor Airport . He oversaw the renovation of all the existing parking structures in town and the construction of the new structures on Ann and Ashley, on Fourth and Washington , and on Forest behind South University .  

For all those projects, Adrian has two goals "to terminate the project on time and within budget." For him, "the biggest challenge is to keep things on schedule. You have to depend on other people and if one falls behind, there is a domino effect. Communication has to be effective all the way down the line, from the foreman, to the contractor, to the laborer." Adrian recalls one case in which he had promised a merchant that a tree in front of his store would not be cut down while the sidewalk was being renovated. "And I told the foreman who told the contractor,  but the contractor didn’t tell the laborer and the next morning at 7 a.m. the first tree cut down was that tree. So now I make sure that every laborer knows exactly what they are supposed to do and what they are not supposed to do!" As Adrian admits, "If I seem like I know so much, it’s only because I’ve made so many mistakes!"  

Based on the quality of Adrian’s work on such beautiful structures as the Fourth and Washington Structure and the enormous amount of time he is putting in on this project, the State Street Area Pedestrian Improvement Project will not only come in on time and within budget, it will get a ten out of ten.  

By James Leonard