Late CEO’s Work to Continue as Parsons Team Wins Bosnia Pact

A consortium led by Parsons Corp. of Pasadena has won a $164.5-million U.S. government contract to help rebuild Bosnia, bringing a bittersweet close to the tragedy that claimed the life of Parsons chief executive Leonard Pieroni in the Bosnia plane crash that killed Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 34 others.

“From our company’s standpoint, we felt it was a must-win type of opportunity just to continue the work Len Pieroni had started in Bosnia,” said Dean Nottingham, director of federal programs for the international engineering firm.

In addition to Parsons, two other members of the consortium-Metcalf & Eddy, a Boston-based subsidiary of Air & Water Technologies, and Riggs International Banking Corp.--also lost their chief executives in the April crash, which occurred during a trade mission to drum up business for U.S. firms in the war-torn region.

James F. McNulty, the former president of Parsons Infrastructure and Technology Group, was chosen as Pieroni’s replacement.

Parsons is the primary contractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development project, which covers the construction of water distribution systems, electric power substations, roads, sewers, bridges and emergency shelter.

The other consortium members are Padco, a Washington, D.C., architecture firm; S.C. Myers Associates, a Washington cost estimating firm, and Unioninvest, a Bosnian engineering and construction firm.

The 100 projects included in the contract are expected to employ 40,000 Bosnians. The work is to begin later this month.

Dangers remain. Nottingham, who is overseeing the Bosnian project, said close to 10% of the cost is tied to the detection and removal of land mines and other live ordnance before the arrival of construction crews.

But he said the tragedy has not deterred Parsons from pushing forward aggressively in places where military activity or primitive conditions make traveling dangerous. Parsons was also involved in the rebuilding of Kuwait and Vietnam.

“We’re always going into areas where we’re the first ones there,” he said.