Civil & Environmental Consultants, Inc.

About Civil & Environmental Consultants

Civil & Environmental Consultants, Inc., known throughout the industry as CEC, is an American engineering and environmental consulting firm with more than 1,500 team members and offices across the United States. The company is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is certified employee-owned.

CEC is consistently ranked by Engineering News-Record, placing 97th on the 2026 Top 500 Design Firms list and 107th on the 2025 Top 200 Environmental Firms list. Its positioning statement is straightforward: invested employees, exceptional service, positive impact.

History

CEC was founded in April 1989 in Pittsburgh by four engineers and scientists: Jim Roberts, Jim Nairn, Ken Miller and Greg Quatchak. Their proposition was that an employee-owned firm focused on both clients and staff could deliver a noticeably higher level of service than its competitors, and employee ownership has remained central ever since. The first stock purchase by a non-founder came in 1991, employee ownership exceeded that of the founders by 2012, and the firm achieved Certified Employee Owned status in 2024.

Within its first year CEC had grown to 25 full-time staff and established four practices: Civil Engineering, Environmental Engineering and Sciences, Waste Management, and Water Resources. Its first office outside Pittsburgh opened in Cincinnati in 1992. Ecological Sciences followed in 1994 under James Mudge, Survey in 2015, Air Quality in 2017, Manufacturing Infrastructure Services in 2020 and Cultural Resources in 2023. Dustin Kuhlman took over as the firm's first non-founder chief executive in 2022, and now serves as CEO, Chairman and President.

Practice Areas

• Civil engineering – site development and land engineering, including a dedicated transportation group.
• Environmental engineering and sciences – site investigation, remediation and compliance, with a specialist PFAS capability.
• Water resources – stormwater, hydrology, hydraulics and water infrastructure.
• Waste management – landfill design, permitting and closure.
• Air quality – permitting, emissions inventories and regulatory compliance.
• Ecological sciences – wetland delineation, habitat assessment and permitting.
• Cultural resources – archaeological and historic resource assessment.
• Survey and geospatial – land surveying, mapping and geospatial data services.
• Manufacturing infrastructure services – engineering support for industrial facilities and plant operations.

Markets Served

CEC works across manufacturing, mining, oil and gas, power including renewables, solid waste, real estate and the public sector. Data centres appear under both the power and real estate markets, reflecting how much of that sector's difficulty lies in site selection, power supply, stormwater management and permitting rather than the building itself.

The combination of civil engineering with environmental science is the practical value of the firm: a manufacturing client expanding a plant, a developer entitling a site, or a utility siting renewable generation typically needs both disciplines working from the same information at the same time.

Culture and Values

CEC organises its values into four sets covering culture, client service, business and core values. The core values are safety, integrity, collaboration, personal and professional development, and service excellence. Safety carries a registered internal slogan, Safety Excellence. We Own It., backed by the position that all accidents are preventable and a commitment to an incident-free workplace for both employees and subcontractors.

Employee resource groups include CEC Community, CECFit!, CEC iDEA, CEC Ignite and CEC Women. The firm also publishes Elements magazine, runs the CEC Explains podcast, and offers educational training courses alongside a formal professional development programme.

Why CEC Matters to the AEC Industry

CEC illustrates how a mid-market technical consultancy can compete against much larger firms by combining breadth with proximity. Nine practice areas under one roof means a client rarely needs to coordinate separate environmental, survey and civil consultants, while a national office network keeps teams close to the sites they work on. For anyone studying employee ownership in professional services, the firm is also a clear worked example: founded on the model in 1989, transferred majority ownership to staff by 2012, and formally certified in 2024.