Eryn is a Vice President and environmental planner and architectural historian with more than 15 years of experience guiding clients through the environmental review process and preparing environmental assessments for large, complex development, infrastructure, and masterplan projects. She serves as the Environmental Planning Director for the Bay Area in the NorCal Community Development group, supporting a team of senior project managers by providing strategic support and QA/QC review. In addition to her project work, Eryn is passionate about mentoring early-career professionals at ESA to help them to grow their skills and take on different projects and challenges. She also served on the Employee Ownership Committee for five years and engages in many JEDI activities both in and outside ESA.
What is your favorite ESA moment/memory so far?
So many to choose from! But I have to say it was my first day at ESA. We were moving across the country and I wasn’t supposed to start work for another week but I was asked to start early to join PM training. It was the perfect way to start a new job. I got to travel to all the NorCal offices at the time and meet people from all our different business groups. Brian Boxer started PM training with the question, “As a project manager, what are the issues and challenges that keep you up at night?” Everyone spoke openly about their worries and fears and it was so cathartic having just come from another AEC company that was also employee-owned but operated much differently. My previous company was majority-owned by a small minority of folks at the top. The company was very siloed and people competed with each other for work, client relationships, and staff resources, which engendered more of a combative than collaborative culture. The people I met at ESA on my first day couldn’t have been more opposite. People were willing to share their successes and lessons learned and speak openly about their concerns and challenges – all with the common goal of learning from each other to become better project managers. I learned that first day that ESA is a company willing to look at itself in the mirror and ask, how can we show up better for each other and be better at what we do? I knew that day this is where I wanted to be. And almost 10 years later I’m excited and delighted that we are still asking these same questions and getting better and improving every year – with each other.
What does it mean to you to be part of an employee-owned company?
For me it’s the most fundamental and literal meaning of that phrase – we, all of us together as employees, own this company. It makes me feel a deep sense of responsibility to hold myself accountable to my goals so that I am keeping up my end of the bargain of what it means to be an employee owner. On top of that I feel a deep sense of responsibility to show up for everyone else I work with to do whatever I can to support their success – whether that is being responsive to internal requests so other people can do their jobs effectively, mentoring people to support their growth, or helping connect staff across business groups with clients and project opportunities to grow work. Being there for each other has more impact on our collective success as employee owners than what we’re capable of doing individually.
What keeps you coming to work here at ESA every day?
The people – the people who’ve been at ESA for longer than I have who have in depth institutional knowledge of this company and a passion for who we are and what we do, and the new people who join ESA every year and bring fresh perspectives and ideas to help us continue to grow, evolve, and improve. Also the learning – I learn tons of new things every day from everyone I connect with at ESA and that is so much fun.
What is your hidden or special talent(s)?
I come from a family of puzzlers. I can knock out a 1,000-piece puzzle in a couple of days. Oddly enough, it’s very relaxing.
What’s your favorite thing to do when you are out of the office?
I love to travel and garden, although it’s mostly orchids at the moment. Records, records, records – listening, cataloguing, (re)organizing. I recently reorganized them by half-decade, which opened up the collection in a much different way. I’m loving the 1990 to 1995 section at the moment.
If you had one free hour each day, how would you use it?
Probably crack open and listen to my latest Record Store Day score.
What are three skills that you bring to the ESA team? In other words, what should colleagues know to reach out to you about?
- Project management
- CEQA strategy (particularly related to airports, infill development, ports, and historic resources issues)
- Creative problem-solving (whether it’s financial, project and/or client management, staffing a project)
In a nutshell, what kind of work does your team do?
The NorCal CD team is incredibly varied because it encapsulates so many different types of practices – air quality, noise, and GHG; transportation; community planning; and CEQA and NEPA environmental work – all related but quite different. Our team prepares everything from climate action plans to specific plans for redevelopment, as well as CEQA and NEPA documentation for infrastructure (including transportation), commercial and residential infill development, and sea-level rise projects just to name a few. We work with a diverse array of clients from private developers to public agencies and across several of our markets including transportation and ports, airports, and energy.
Describe your role at ESA and the type of work you do.
I’m the client service manager for SFO and serve as the key technical lead for CEQA in addition to supporting a team of nine other key technical leads who provide biological resources, environmental hydrology, transportation, aircraft noise, air quality and GHG, data management, hazmat, archeology, and historic resources support for many different SFO projects. As key technical leads for this client, we all support an additional 120 ESA staff on SFO projects. I also work extensively with the Port of San Francisco, San Francisco Recreation and Parks, and various private developers on commercial, mixed-use projects. I’ve managed several complex EIRs over the last decade but spend more time as a project director supporting other project managers these days.
What’s been your favorite project to work on here at ESA and what impact did it have on the community and/or environment?
The SFO Shoreline Protection Program EIR was probably my favorite project to manage. It’s an important project that will protect the airport from sea-level rise through end-of-century, but it also was a super complex EIR with multiple technical analyses. We had an incredible team and everyone brought their best work to the table. The entire CEQA process unfolded without a hitch, the project won an award, and midstream through the CEQA process, thanks to Melissa Denena, we won all the permitting and compensatory mitigation work that was initially slated to be done by other consultants – that was the cherry on top. The big CEQA push is over but our key bio technical leads are in the thick of permitting and compensatory mitigation and our data management team is designing a system that will assist SFO in tracking their permitting and mitigation requirements for the project through implementation. It was an honor and pleasure to work with and learn from so many different ESA practices and talented people and see what we can deliver as a company when we are highly aligned around the common goal of doing our best work for a client. Huge thanks to everyone involved in that project for making it the highlight of my career thus far.
Have you had the opportunity to work on any career-defining projects?
The one I just mentioned! But I would say SFO has and continues to be a career-defining client for me. I’ve managed this client for eight years and what started off as a modest on-call for environmental work has grown into multiple contracts that cover nine practice areas. I’m really excited for the year ahead though as we’ll be kicking off some big projects with SFMTA (a new client for us), the Port of San Francisco, and SF Rec Park – so hopefully more career-defining projects to come!
