November 12, 2025
Community-Centered Discipline & Delivery
Minimizing disruption, maximizing trust, and delivering certainty start long before the first shovel hits the ground.
Article by Armando Tiscareño, Executive Vice President at Stacy Witbeck
Communication methods may shift by neighborhood and by impact, reflecting the unique character, pace, and priorities of each community. What works in a dense downtown corridor may differ entirely from what resonates in a rural residential area or near a local business district.
As Malcolm Gladwell notes in Revisionist History, “communication climates vary by city”, and in practice, communication strategies shift by project. Each project brings its own mix of stakeholders, histories, and expectations. What builds trust in one community may fall flat in another. The tone, timing, and even the channels of communication must adapt to local context. What remains constant is the importance of early collaboration and timely, transparent responses.
Planning: Setting the Communication Climate
Early planning can set the stage for a project’s communication climate. This requires looking beyond the physical construction itself. Understanding how people live, work, and move through the project area allows for the delivery team to balance competing priorities before construction begins. Even looking at past construction sentiment and how the public perceived those projects is insight into community values. By studying what worked and what didn’t on prior efforts, teams can anticipate potential friction points, build stronger communication frameworks, and reduce the risk of public opposition once work begins.
Preconstruction is where vision meets discipline. This is when high-level goals are translated into actionable plans, and teams identify competing priorities and constraints – and even acknowledging ideas that, while appealing, may not be feasible. Equally critical at this stage is setting expectations with the community. Preconstruction is about sharing context: why utility relocations are needed, why access roads may avoid flood zones, or how temporary impacts will be managed.
Engagement: Building Around the Community
In Houston, when building the light rail expansion, we worked with a unique community stakeholder: a restaurant supply business along the corridor that relied on four different delivery points. Our superintendent met directly with them, coordinated schedules, and checked in the week before, a few days before, and the day of major deliveries. Coordinating around their schedule was essential to avoid disrupting food service operations in the area, which could have cascading effects on multiple local businesses. Construction was staged without interrupting their operations. Early understanding gave the owner greater cost certainty by pricing conditions into the project from the start, and it gave the community a design that better reflected their needs and values.
Similarly, when constructing the streetcar alignment in Kansas City, the route crossed many active driveways. We used movable steel plates that could be shifted in 15 minutes, keeping driveways open. Without coordination, businesses could have been cut off for hours. Rather than flexing when needed, the flexibility was planned during preconstruction. That kind of built-in flexibility continues to define how we approach access management today.
Connection: Humanizing Construction
On the Phoenix Northwest Extension project, we introduced Maxx Transit as a mascot and built a social media presence around him. He visited schools and appeared at community events, sharing updates on closures, milestones, and impacts. Instead of newsletters, people had something they looked forward to following.
Sometimes the most non-traditional approaches to community involvement are the ones that are embraced – and accepted.
Maxx Transit became a recognizable figure at community celebrations, school programs, and open houses. During the grand opening of the Northwest Extension Phase II, Maxx was featured prominently in promotional materials and activities, engaging with attendees and providing information about the new light rail stations and services. Social media posts featuring Maxx included behind-the-scenes looks at construction milestones, interactive polls, and Q&A sessions, which allowed the community to feel informed, involved, and heard. Students at local schools participated in transit education programs, learning about public transportation and safety while also having fun interacting with Maxx, further spreading awareness and fostering pride in the project.
Translating technicalities into an accessible and engaging narrative can humanize the construction process and generate goodwill in the neighborhoods affected.
On the Seattle streetcar project, a delivery conflict with a farmer’s market was resolved by our team assisting with weekend unloading. That task wasn’t part of the scope or contract, but rather it was an aspect of being part of the community.
Actions outside formal contract obligations, like this, are considered when they reduce risk, maintain service continuity, or build project advocates. In this instance, we took off the employer hat and put on the neighbor hat to really think beyond contractual obligations and see the project through the lens of those who interact with it daily.
Trust: Creating Shared Accountability in Action
Not typical of a contract scope, but when we flipped the performance evaluation to the public, allowing them to provide input on how construction was going as it progressed. Part of project profit was tied to performance scores from community advisory boards. Residents and business owners graded the team on outreach, safety, and quality, and, on average, over 90 percent of those incentives were earned.
Earning back 90 percent was not a reflection of failure in outreach, but rather the team’s own high standards. Internal evaluations were often stricter than community or agency assessments, with staff holding themselves accountable for even minor issues such as short delays.
Linking incentives to community satisfaction reinforces that successful delivery can also be measured in public perception and trust.
In some cases, agency leadership adjusted scores to reflect broader consensus, but any withheld funds were redirected to project scope, ensuring the benefit returned to the community rather than the contractor. This approach aligns financial incentives with public value, demonstrating a commitment to shared success rather than isolated gain.
Delivery: The Project-First Mindset in Motion
Continuously prioritizing community needs over short-term convenience, or profit allows organizations to move beyond constructing physical assets and toward building lasting trust in the communities they serve.
The true measure of modern infrastructure delivery is completing the project on paper and earning the trust that allows you to build again. When the industry recognizes that every interaction, every decision, and every innovation shapes that trust, we move from transactional construction to meaningful, lasting partnerships with the communities we serve.