With his 15th-floor office still not fully unpacked, Tom Stoneburner finalized the acquisition last Monday of a five-person engineering firm, Mazda, that had been based in downtown St. Paul. It wasn’t a bad showing for his first official day as CEO of St. Paul engineering and architecture firm TKDA.

Stoneburner, who joined TKDA straight out of the University of Minnesota some 32 years ago, isn’t promising that every day will be a growth spurt for the century-old firm, but his goal is grow TKDA’s presence in St. Paul and nationally.

How will he do that? His long-term strategy is to export to the rest of the country what the company is already known for in Minnesota. Related Articles Business is booming for UV technology, the radiation that kills viruses

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The company’s modern portfolio — equally split between public and private contracts — includes the airplane ramps at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, aspects of the original and renovated Union Depot transit hub in downtown St. Paul, and the ongoing historic renovation of Pioneer Hall, a signature dorm and dining facility at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

There are rain gardens, interstate corridors, rooftop solar displays, water towers and libraries that bear the TKDA name. Next up is the replacement of the Dale Street bridge over Interstate 94 in St. Paul, as well as a lengthy stretch of Interstate 35W in Forest Lake.

TIME STOOD STILL

Since the horse-and-buggy days of Minnesota’s capital city, the completely employee-owned firm has become a ubiquitous presence in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. If you don’t know TKDA, you know its work: from the Warner Road Bridge in St. Paul to the Space Tower at the Minnesota State Fair. Outside of Minnesota, however, its visibility has only grown in the last 12 years. Related Articles Business is booming for UV technology, the radiation that kills viruses

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Stoneburner admits he hasn’t spent his entire career with the company. A few years in, he and his wife returned to their roots in northern Minnesota and found work in Duluth, leaving TKDA behind for about 18 months. They quickly returned, and Stoneburner got more than his old job back.

“I got my old desk, my old phone number. The calendar for the month that I left was still up on the wall,” he recalled with a chuckle. “Time stood still.”

It’s now speeding up. Following its acquisition of the Mazda firm, TKDA’s newest engineers still check into work in Minnesota’s capital city, because the company whose founder once worked for railroad magnate James J. Hill has never moved its headquarters more than six blocks downtown, even as its six satellite offices have expanded from Florida to Seattle under former CEO Bill Deitner.

With the exception of Duluth, those satellite offices are almost exclusively focused on rail or, in the case of the Florida office, aviation projects. Stoneburner hopes to see their work diversify. The company’s five-year strategic plan, which was completed with the help of an outside facilitator after days of meetings with employees and vice presidents, came together on paper last year, and it calls for expansion.

Employee-owned TKDA has been designing the MSP Airport ramps since World War II. Among its projects: bridge at Target Field Station, the ongoing Pioneer Hall historic renovation at the U of M, the Robert Street bridge and municipal parking ramp in St. Paul, Warner Road Bridge… pic.twitter.com/RAwuGQWKqL — FredMelo, Reporter (@FrederickMelo) April 3, 2018

“As of right now, we don’t have any specific locations, but one of our goals is to grow our regional offices,” said Stoneburner, from a 15th floor meeting room at UBS Plaza on downtown St. Paul’s Cedar Street. “Right now they’re all fairly small. We’d like to grow — as well as expand in St. Paul.”

At a time when cities are scrambling to lure major employers like Amazon.com to so much as visit their downtowns, Stoneburner smiles at the prospect of a much surer bet: a homegrown company gaining a national footprint while expanding in place.

A ST. PAUL HISTORY

The “T” in TKDA stands for Toltz, as in Maximilian Toltz — an engineering employee of James J. Hill — who ventured out on his own to found the Toltz Engineering Co. in 1910. Additional partners signed on in the mid-1950s, and TKDA became known for its major roles in designing the Marjorie McNeely Conservatory in St. Paul’s Como Park, the iconic Hamm Building in downtown St. Paul and the city’s Robert and Wabasha street bridges over the Mississippi River. Even the boilers at the Cathedral of St. Paul are of Toltz design.

TKDA and its more than 200 St. Paul employees now occupy five floors of the UBS Plaza building. Behind Stoneburner, a bay of glass windows overlooks the Cedar Street corridor to the Minnesota State Capitol building, as well as a municipal parking ramp that Stoneburner personally engineered in the early 1990s.

“I did the design on the Robert Street parking ramp over here in post-tension concrete, which I hadn’t done before,” said Stoneburner, who holds a certification in LEED environmentally-sustainable design, while gesturing out his bay windows. “So I had to learn a lot.”

The horses and buggies are gone, and so are the drafting boards, papers and pencils. Clients can now take 3D virtual tours of certain projects years before earth is turned, and engineers and architects — the company employs both at a 70/30 split — can forecast where duct work collides with water piping.

Stoneburner’s predecessor, Deitner, who remains on the company’s board of directors, has been grooming him for the top job for the past two or three years, if not the past 32. Stoneburner notes he rose along the same career ladder, running the company’s facilities/buildings division after Deitner did.

“I’ve been in his wake the whole time,” jokes Stoneburner.