Faced with a looming 2017 deadline to reduce nutrients released into the Chesapeake Bay watershed, the City of Baltimore’s Dept. of Public Works is pushing to complete more than $500 million of improvements at its Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant.
The total value of the 25 contracts that make up this year’s ENR MidAtlantic Top Starts list—which includes projects that got underway in 2015—is down sharply, to $5.7 billion from $10.7 billion in last year’s ranking.
As an architect focusing on health-care design with the firm Francis Cauffman, Thompson sees growth in that sector due to “hospitals designing new spaces around the requirements of the Affordable Care Act, providing enhanced care for an aging population and needing to upgrade aging infrastructure.”