Our current CEO, Mike Spillane, began working for Herrera to gain real-world experience while in college. He was 20. He offered to work for free, but Carlos decided to pay him an intern wage because he would soon be literally immersed in leachate and sorting through solid waste. Mike’s expertise and responsibility grew. Now he delights in personally teaching early professionals how to integrate good constructability with good science in our designs.

As our company grew, scientists and engineers were hired in equal numbers to naturally encourage a culture where ideas are challenged and refined based on diverse expertise and perspectives. Everyone is expected to learn, teach, and achieve new things with our clients daily. Expertise in environmental compliance and land use permitting was added in 1992, followed by wetland science, limnology, hazardous site assessment, fisheries expertise, landscape architecture, ecology, geomorphology, GIS, and spatial statistics over the next 20 years.

True to his ethics, Carlos sold the company to its employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) in 2005. He retired (for the most part) in 2017 and now lives on a small, organic farm near Olympia.

While the Seattle office remains our largest, we planted additional offices as we grew into a regionally recognized interdisciplinary design firm: Portland, Oregon, in 2000; Missoula, Montana, in 2000; Olympia, Washington (through a merger with EnviroVision) in 2008; and Bellingham, Washington, in 2014.