By Jaime Franchi
On a leafy street in Rosedale, Queens, sometime in the 1950s, a second grader named Charlie Bartha stood fascinated as men in orange vests operated bright yellow construction equipment outside his home. They made busy work and raucous noises, tearing up the sidewalks. Over many months, they diligently installed timber sheeting and new sewer infrastructure on concrete cradles under expertly paved new roads. Those sewers allowed for not only the expansion of Charlie’s neighborhood but also planted the seed that would eventually lead to the development of young Charlie’s career.
He knew from a young age that he wanted to be an engineer. His father was very handy; he could build or fix anything. Working for the NYC Board of Education as a building maintenance manager/stationary engineer in charge of the heating plant and custodial work, he brought Charlie along with him. During high school and his college years, he worked summers, holidays and weekends for his father, doing custodial work and actually shoveling coal into coal fired boilers. Although his father had no formal education, he had a talent for electrical work. As a child, Charlie would devour the mechanical engineering magazine he had delivered to the house. He might have preferred that Charlie go into electrical engineering, but Charlie set his sights on becoming a civil engineer.
Being a city kid, his options for high school-level study boiled down to three public specialty schools: Brooklyn Tech, Bronx High School of Science, and Stuyvesant. He wanted to get into Brooklyn Tech in the worst way, and when he did, he was thrilled for the opportunity to travel an hour and a half each way on buses and subways to attend class. He continued his education at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute in the same neighborhood, focusing on civil engineering. Upon graduation, one of his professors recommended Charlie to Suffolk County when their brand-new environmental control department launched its inaugural sewer program. Charlie interviewed with Suffolk County for his first job out of college and was told that he didn’t have enough experience, so he worked in Manhattan doing sewer design for two years, with the allure of Suffolk County always beckoning him.
“I really wanted to get as far away from New York as I could,” Bartha told Road Warriors. In 1972, when the time was right, Charlie went back, and things went a little differently this time. “The Deputy Commissioner who was interviewing me—and the department was still very small at that point—I asked him what kind of advancement opportunities there were.” He asked Charlie if he would earn his PE (professional engineering) license, and Charlie said yes—and made good on that promise while attending graduate school back at Brooklyn Polytechnic during his evenings. The Deputy Commissioner told Charlie he could Commissioner someday. “And that made it a goal.”
Someday
Charlie reached his goal of becoming Suffolk County Department of Public Works Commissioner—twice. In Suffolk County, the Commissioner’s position for the Department of Public Works requires a Professional Engineer’s license. And that, from time to time, becomes controversial throughout the country. “I think it is important,” Charlie told Road Warriors. “It’s a threshold. On the other hand, it takes a lot of people to make something work.”
One of the first things he accomplished at the County as Deputy Commissioner was to work with the Civil Service department to create a new pathway for construction workers without PE licenses to advance. “They didn’t go to college,” Charlie said, “but these guys knew construction and knew it well. So, working with Civil Service, I created a new ladder for them to advance. And, similarly, in the late ‘80s, we established a Deputy Commissioner position where you didn’t need a PE license. There are plenty of aspects in that position where you don’t need a PE license.” In 1985, he became Deputy Commissioner. “That was enlightening because, at that point, I’d only been involved in the wastewater side of sanitary construction,” he said. “Then I got involved in highways and the buildings division. It was a great opportunity to see all of these things.” He became Chief Deputy for a while until finally reaching his ultimate goal of becoming Suffolk County Department of Public Works Commissioner at the end of 1997.
“That was a rewarding thing for a guy who is a civil engineer,” he said. “It’s also a risky position – as was Deputy and Chief Deputy. You serve at the pleasure of the County Executive. I understood that and knew I could do something else. I always planned to return to the private sector. I never planned to stay at the County for as long as I did.” He stayed with the County for thirty-four years. A year after Charlie was eligible, he elected to retire. In 2006, he joined Sidney B. Bowne and Son, doing business development. He stayed in that role for eleven years, working with people he’d met both before and during his government work. He enjoyed the change of pace. “I thought it was energizing,” he said. “It was never doing something completely different – I was just doing it from a different perspective. It was also less of a burden because I wasn’t responsible for as many people.” After the company sold after 100 years in business, Charlie seized the opportunity to work for P.W. Grosser as Senior Vice President. P.W. Grosser provides environmental consulting and engineering services to federal, state, municipal, and private clients.
“P.W. Grosser was a much younger company with slightly different twists. I helped bring a lot of site engineering work of a larger scope than they had done before. They had some minor projects, but larger projects followed me there. I enjoyed it. It was a younger company – I had a mentoring role and brought some more business to them. I enjoyed mentoring and helping people earlier in their careers and sharing my experiences. And I’m someone who believes the more info people have, the better decisions they can make about their career. So, I always spoke to people when they started with the company. I told them my story, got their story, and asked where they wanted to go with their careers.” Just like the Deputy Commissioner did back when Charlie first started, telling him he just might be Commissioner someday. When Ed Romaine took office as Suffolk County Executive this January, Charlie once again assumed the position.
Projects of Significance
One of the great perks of the job is seeing a construction project through to the end. One of the greatest joys of Charlie’s life is attending a ribbon cutting: the culmination of a concept, design, and the arduous build process. Charlie was Commissioner in 1998 during the construction of the Ducks ballpark, currently named Fairfield Properties Ballpark. The stadium broke ground in 1999 and opened to the public on April 28, 2000. The 6002-seat state-of-the-art stadium has seen more than 9 million fans since it opened and boasts 20 luxury boxes, a 126-seat bar/restaurant, and an indoor batting tunnel.
“It was exciting,” Charlie remembers. “We built and designed it within eighteen months of getting the grants. It was made really clear by the County Exec’s office that this is the schedule, and you have to make it work.” Under Suffolk County Executive Robert Gaffney’s time constraints, they built the stadium with nine separate prime contractors in two phases to expedite this massive project. “We had the foundation and all sorts of basic stuff done,” Charlie remembers. “We put that out to bid. In the meantime, we completed the rest of the design and bid that separately.” One of the legislators was particularly concerned about meeting the deadline. He called Charlie so many times during construction that Charlie finally had to say, “I’m taking up a lot of time telling you it will get done. In the end, he trusted me, and we made it happen. We had good contractors on the job and got it done.” The seats were still being bolted down during the daytime of opening night.
Working on that project was a lesson in not only building a stadium but in building relationships. You build trust and equity in future collaborations by making promises and following through. When you make mistakes, you learn how to do it right. And when you discover who to call when you need something, you have secured yourself a map toward future success. Through projects such as Ducks Stadium, Charlie secured a reputation as a man of his word.
Charlie built a relationship with LICA quite indirectly. Through his work as DPW Commissioner, he interacted with the principals of Long Island construction. “I got to know the icons of the industry: Mario and Dominic Posillico, Carl Lizza etc,” Charlie said. “All these people to me were very impressive – and the more I learned about them, the more impressed I was. Then, from getting to know them I was introduced to LICA. It is exciting to have the opportunity to work with the current and future legends of the construction industry. To me, it’s like ACEC (American Council of Engineering Companies). Instead of dealing with all different facets, you are dealing with the industry as a whole.”
Organizations like LICA are helpful to someone in Charlie’s position when he needs to take the temperature of the entire industry to make informed policy decisions, best practices, or areas to improve. “Which you know helps from my perspective as Commissioner,” he says. “I can deal with Marc and yourself and see what everybody wants. They always want more work. As I tell consulting engineers, let’s argue for a bigger pie rather than a bigger piece of the pie.”
What’s Next?
Coming back as Suffolk County Department of Public Works Commissioner must be not only surreal, but also exciting. It’s a chance to take care of unfinished business but also to see the position from a renewed perspective, with some distance. For Charlie, he returns with vigor and focused direction. He brings Leslie Mitchel as Deputy Commissioner, with whom he has enjoyed a longstanding working partnership, from his time in Suffolk County to his private sector position at P.W. Grosser. His priority is to expedite the payment process in the County. His goal is to streamline and eliminate redundancies. “I also want to see with respect to construction, uniformity across the major divisions, what the construction standards are and what’s expected so everyone understands.” By “everyone,” Charlie refers not only to contractors but to Suffolk County residents so that everyone understands what’s expected.
From there, “We will get more competitive bids, and more realistic bids. And it will be less expensive in the long run.” For example, DOT receives more bids on highway jobs than the county does on highway jobs. Charlie aims to investigate that more. Why? Because having more bidders is better for the county. “I know I’ll be more collaborative,” he says. “I have a good reputation doing that, but now we want to find a common goal whether it’s the health department for private developers or the police department that may need some special consideration in their building – to try to bring everybody to work together.”
Charlie is looking to coordinate departments within county government, and outside of government. The private sector has developed a good relationship in many of the towns in Suffolk and Nassau. He plans to hold an informational gathering of the DPW department heads every couple of months. “All you need is to gain one new idea.” Other priorities include replacing the Smith Point Bridge. There will be a major study starting soon for County Road 39. When he left, they had just developed a plan to reduce lane widths in each direction, so he looks forward to looking creatively at what can be done again. And, of course, there are sewer projects galore. “My career started in the sewer and will end in the sewer,” he says.