Jonathan D. Epstein

Maria Lehman has always had a fondness for her hometown. Now she gets to take that passion to the national stage.

The 61-year-old civil engineer was born in Buffalo to Polish refugees who fled their native land during World War II and fought for the British in the Middle East.

A graduate of University at Buffalo, she has spent more than 40 years designing, advising and leading infrastructure projects in both the public and private sectors.

For most of that career – three decades – she helped clients navigate challenges on over 700 projects ranging in size from $10,000 to $3.9 billion, as a project executive, manager or engineer.

But she also worked two stints in government – first under former Erie County Executive Joel Giambra as public works commissioner, and later as chief operating officer for the State Thruway Authority under former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

Last May, she joined the Buffalo office of Australian-based engineering and construction firm GHD, which specializes in sustainable water, energy and urban infrastructure.

There, she is the firm’s U.S. director of infrastructure for what is now the 27th-largest engineering firm in the country – although she has yet to set foot in the local office because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

She is also poised to become president of the American Society of Civil Engineers – the first Western New Yorker to lead the national professional organization, and among the first women to assume the role.

And she plans to use her new bully pulpit to advance both future planning for her field as well as the career aspirations of women and minorities in engineering.

Q: What are the opportunities in the new federal infrastructure legislation?

A: There’s a lot of confusion about the bill itself. It’s $1.2 trillion. That includes five years of reauthorization of surface transportation, which is all but aviation; five years of Clean Water Act reauthorization; and five years of safe drinking water reauthorization; and a whole bunch of other things in there. What is in there is $550 billion of new money, for various programs.

If you look at what the needs are and what is being spent today between local, state and federal money, the gap for 17 categories [in surface transportation, water and wastewater and electric transmission] was $2.6 trillion in 10 years.

That means a $1.3 trillion gap for five years, and we’re getting $550 billion, so it’s half the gap. It’s a good start. It is not the silver bullet.

Q: How about for Buffalo?

A: The Buffalo Niagara International Airport will get $37.5 million, NFTA gets $156.5 million additional, and then there’s a lot of other things.

Buffalo is going to see a lot of money toward their lead-pipe replacement program, because they already have one. There’s going to be more money in internet, because we have both the rural deserts that we do in Western New York and the urban deserts in the city.

The Great Lakes Initiative program got $1 billion. Even the big park stuff, that the Wilson Foundation is funding, you’ll see more waterside improvements.

It’s not like we have no idea what we’re going to do with that money. Everybody has a list. There’s just more money available. It could be transformative.

Q: And you’re about to take on a national role?

A: I am currently president-elect for ASCE. We have 150,000 members in 177 countries worldwide. I’ve been active with ASCE since my student chapter days at UB, and I was first the director for New York-New Jersey. Then I was vice president for the Northeast in early 2000s. I was treasurer last year. And I will become president of the organization in October 2022. We treat presidents as a three-year stint: president-elect, president and past-president. We cover for each other. It’s a lot of territory for people to cover.

I’ve been involved with public policy for ASCE since the early ’90s. We have 177 policies on everything from the portability of retirement benefits to how do you handle earthquake loads. What’s different about ASCE is that’s an individual-join organization. We’re one-third consultants and contractors, one-third government engineers and one-third academicians.

So all those committees, you have to get that kind of diversity to agree on things, and everything is consensus-based. So there’s a lot of work that goes into anything we put out there, and it’s been technically proofed and re-proofed.

Q: What are your goals?

A: They all go under the banner of creating a future world-vision. It’s something that we are working on right now. We’re looking at what infrastructure will look like in 50 years.

The whole idea is to think about those things as they’re designing things today, because those projects are likely to be here in 50 years. So there’s things they have to think about in the lifecycle of a project.

The built environment has not seen the disruption that other industries have, but that’s coming.

If you’re going to have drones delivering lunch to a building, you’re going to think differently about how you’re going to allow that to happen.

We’re looking at providing tools to give people a basis for thought as they’re establishing these rules and guidelines and specs for the future, while at the same time getting middle school and high school kids to understand how exciting a career in this business is.

Then, looking at diversity and inclusion in the business, 30% of our engineers are women, yet 70% of women leave engineering within 20 years – and that was before Covid. We’ve got to do better than that. I think minorities have the same comments and concerns.

In time, it’s going to be a problem for everybody, and with the amount of work that we have to do, we have to aspire to be a profession that people stay with.

Q: How does it feel to be the first Buffalonian in your new role?

A: I’m a first-generation Buffalonian. My parents were both World War II refugees, both from Poland. My dad left before the war. He was a district attorney and judge in Silesia in southwestern Poland, so he left the country and joined the Polish wing of the British army, went through the Middle Eastern theater, and ended up in England.

My brother and sister were born in Palestine during the war, but my parents decided that my brother and sister would have a better life in the U.S., and my dad had a first cousin in Buffalo. I was born in Buffalo.

There’s so much potential here. We have fresh water, sustainable energy, and higher education per capita than many parts of the country. So overlaying my Buffalo ambassador on this is very exciting.

Q: You’re also the sixth woman president in the trade group’s history. How important is that?

A: I was vice president under our first woman president, Pat Galloway, who lives on the West Coast. I saw a lot of her ability to make a lot of changes for the positive.

I’m a little distraught that things haven’t changed more in our industry in the 40 years that I’ve been practicing, because they really haven’t. There were four women in engineering at UB when I graduated … We’ve got to do better than that … I want it to look like the neighborhoods we work in and not an old model.

Q: What does GHD do?

A: We basically work in a lot of wastewater, environment facilities, transportation, and then we have future energy as a business. Those are all the areas we work in. The firm is headquartered in Australia. It came to the U.S. 16 to 17 years ago, and made major acquisitions. It’s been a lot of growth, and so there’s a lot of harmonizing, first of all.

And second, thinking about projects across those lines, instead of inside the business. If you’ve doing water and wastewater, there’s an incredible nexus with energy. When you’re a water and wastewater plant, your biggest bill is the energy to run the facilities.

In the past, that was thought of as two separate things, instead of coming together. What we’ve learned through Covid is that infrastructure is a structure of structures, and it’s the weak link that makes everything break down.

Q: What experience do you bring?

A: I’ve got 40 years in the business, 30 in the private side. I was commissioner of public works for Erie County from 2000-2005. I had promised Joel Giambra I would work five years for him. I had to clean up that whole mess at the county, and then the Red-Green budget fiasco. I was done with the county, but I wasn’t done with public service. I ended up going to work for the governor as risk manager for the Tappan Zee Bridge project, and I helped get the design-build legislation passed.

I kind of laugh. The politicians think I’m an engineer, and the engineers think I’m a politician. I’ve got the chops, but I can speak public policy.