During the summer months in Lancaster County, my wife pretty much refuses to buy fruits and vegetables from anywhere except a local roadside stand. She likes knowing that the produce was grown in a nearby garden and probably picked just a few days ago. She likes that the quality of the produce is better because it’s been vine-ripened and handled with care instead of shipped from California in a giant truck and painted to look ripe. She likes paying less than what she would at a large grocery store chain and likes getting to know the people behind the stands. Sometimes she’ll even make special requests for something that the stand isn’t selling that day. For all these reasons, she chooses to stay local.

And for many of the same reasons, I’ve chosen to establish and maintain this engineering firm locally. It’s part of how we’re designed for community.

In order to design improvements that benefit the local community and do it in a considerate and caring way, I feel that it’s important to be part of that community. This helps me to understand the concerns of the people involved and try to design features to address as many of those concerns as possible. Indubitably, some folks in the community will have conflicting options about what needs done, but having a deep understanding of all the issues allows the designer to propose the best feasible solution.

So you won’t find Lancaster Civil chasing the hot spots for engineering work such as up in Marcellus Shale country, or hopping on board the mountain of state-wide Turnpike/highway work that needs completed.  We’re staying local so that we can offer the high quality, good prices and personalized service that you’d expect from a roadside farm stand.

We’re civil by definition.  Local by choice.