“He speaks with equal humility and equal care, whether he’s talking to a person on a flight or a bartender about gin and tonic, an Uber driver, a CEO or an elected official. He makes you feel like a million bucks,” says Manish Kothari, president and CEO of Sheladia Associates Inc., who has worked closely with Pecori on multiple endeavors. “He’s one of those ‘Don’t follow me, let’s walk together and let’s make the world a better place’ kind of guys.”

Pecori signs a memo of understanding with China aviation representatives.
Photo courtesy of Hanson Professional Services Inc.

Groundwork

Pecori says the way he got interested in engineering was very fortuitous. “What happened was my brother was working at Hanson as a geotechnical lab technician,” Pecori recalls. “The company was founded in 1954 by a professor from the University of Illinois, Walt Hanson, which is why we’re headquartered in Springfield.”

In between his junior and senior years of high school, he began working at the company part time.

“I had no clue what an engineer did, but my father was a terrazzo tile construction worker. We immigrated to this country, and I started seeing what these guys were doing because of the specialization and connections they had,” Pecori says. “That’s what got me interested.”

He earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in civil engineering at the University of Illinois, returning to work during summers and holidays. Pecori officially joined Hanson in 1974 as a resident geotechnical engineer and was the company’s 50th employee at its first Springfield office.

“I was planning on coming to work in the office, but I ended up being a resident geotechnical engineer on a power plant in Southern Illinois,” Pecori recalls. “Then I went to Northern Indiana on a power plant, back to the office for about five months. And then I was asked to be the resident engineer for the construction of about six miles of interstate highway around Atlanta, Illinois. It was all field work at the beginning. And then I came back and started working on a variety of things.”

Pecori is pictured, fourth from the left, at the Schahfer NIPSCO plant in Northwest Indiana, one of his early assignments at Hanson.
Photo courtesy of Hanson Professional Services Inc.

Impactful Projects

In the decades that followed, Pecori tackled projects across the U.S. and abroad, including other road and highway projects along with bridges and dams as well as various Dept. of Defense projects. He also took on environmental remediation and low-level nuclear waste (LLRW) site projects, such as the LLRW disposal facility for the Central Midwest Low-Level Waste Compact in Illinois and Kentucky and the Sheffield LLRW disposal site in Sheffield, Ill.

In the early 1990s, Pecori served as principal-in-charge and technical adviser on the Ground Wave Emergency Network program at U.S. Air Force facilities nationwide.

“I also worked on railroads for probably 15 years, and I’m still working on them,” Pecori says. “Right now, we’re finishing up this large project in Springfield that we’ve been working on for more than 15 years.”

That’s the $550-million Springfield Rail Improvements Project, for which Hanson’s scope is design engineering, program management and construction observation services. By improving, relocating and consolidating rail lines from 3rd Street to 10th Street, the project will boost passenger and freight train capacity for Springfield’s rail corridors.

“It’s going to open up Springfield and connect underserved areas with the main part of the city. We ended up putting in about seven underpasses, so the connectivity between the east and the west is vastly improved,” he says. “The very first underpass we did—at one point it took maybe 15 to 20 minutes to get from there to the closest underpass to reach a medical facility. With this new underpass, you can get there in 5 minutes or less.”

During construction on one project segment, crews uncovered the remnants of a 1908 Springfield race riot site, leading to an extensive archaeological excavation. President Biden designated the site a National Monument in 2024. An exhibition space at the new transportation center will display some of the uncovered artifacts.

“This project has paved the way for some major transformative actions in the community,” says Kenneth Wm. Smith, CEO at engineering firm T. Baker Smith. “Satch’s leadership, influence and commitment to the Springfield community have been crucial to these efforts [to improve] the infrastructure and quality of life for Springfield residents.”

A $544-million project that consolidated rail lines in Springfield, Ill., is expected to increase rail traffic capacity.
Photo courtesy of Hanson Professional Services Inc.

But there aren’t just historical and transit-related benefits at play. There are also educational opportunities through an initiative that Pecori was instrumental in launching called the Grow Our Own Minority Participation Program.

“We’re mentoring minority youth in this program that is jointly funded by Hanson, the city of Springfield and Sangamon County. It’s been going on for 13 years now, but what it does is high school kids and early college students get the opportunity to see what engineering is all about on projects that we’re working on here in Springfield,” Pecori says. “And you can see the excitement and enthusiasm in these young people.”

Students also have access to education, job training and internships through the program, which continues to foster STEAM careers throughout the area.

Pecori is always thinking about how he can help people get to where they need to be in order to succeed, says Jeff Ball, president at Hanson.

“When I started at Hanson, Satch was the head of our business development group, so I didn’t really interact with him,” he says. After Pecori was named president, their interactions remained mostly brief.

“In the early 2000s, Satch called me into his office and wanted to promote me to be a market principal, which is running one of the six business units that constitute the organization. And I was just a project manager, so I would be leapfrogging a lot of people,” Ball says. “We had long conversations for a few days because I didn’t immediately say yes. And so that was really my first exposure to Satch—when he came to me and said, ‘I’d like you to take on this role.’ I was really surprised by how much Satch did know about what I did and what I had been doing and the successes that I had had and that he had been watching. I liked to be under the radar and always thought that I had been.”

It comes down to a focus on uplifting people and helping them be the best they can be, Pecori says.

“The idea of just pushing yourself a little bit past your comfort zone so that new, relatively uncomfortable feeling becomes your comfort zone. And by doing that, you’ll grow. That’s what we try to tell everybody. Just get out of your comfort zone a little bit,” he says.

At 3,300 ft in length, the Tanana River Bridge, designed by Hanson Professional Services, is the longest bridge in Alaska.
Photo courtesy of Hanson Professional Services Inc.

Giving Back

The Grow Our Own program is just one example of the Hanson—and Pecori—philosophy of giving back to the community.

“Satch does a fundraiser every year at Lincoln Land Community College for their culinary arts program, where he goes in and he’s the celebrity chef,” Ball says. “They do it every year as a huge fundraiser for the culinary arts program because he’s very passionate about food and cooking and wine.”

Some of his other professional and volunteer roles include serving on boards at the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure and the Lincoln Presidential Foundation. He also teaches engineering mechanics courses at local colleges and serves as a mentor to engineering students at his alma mater.

“There’s not a more optimistic person in the entire world. This is a guy who doesn’t see the glass as half full. He sees the glass as overflowing all the time. It’s always overflowing,” Ball says. “That’s who he is, and it comes across in all things that he does.”

Pecori has received multiple awards, including the Boy Scouts of America Abraham Lincoln Council’s Trailblazer Award in 2015, ASCE’s Outstanding Projects and Leaders Award in the management category in 2020 and the Ellis Island Medal of Honor in 2019.

On the professional front, Pecori is actively involved with the American Council of Engineering Companies, the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Illinois Society of Professional Engineers, among others, serving in local and national roles.

“If anybody knows Satch, he’s been talking for many decades now about value pricing,” Kothari says. “And he was visionary in terms of seeing where the industry was going and the way governments were working.”

As efficiencies are increasing, Pecori points out that the same liability rests on companies’ shoulders regardless of how fast construction is completed. “So getting paid less for what you do and having the same liability doesn’t go hand in hand. I think at the end of the day, the industry should be taking a look at being paid for an outcome as opposed to by hours,” he says. Pecori was “bold enough to swim upstream when he was bringing up this issue. Now everybody looks at him and says that Satch was ahead of his time. So to me, that’s a great legacy that he will leave behind—making our profession more relevant, resilient and sustainable going forward,” Kothari says.