Passive House, Land Development & Renewable Energy Civil Works in Atlantic Canada | Design Point Engineering

0:03Welcome back to the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Before we jump into the next episode, it's Burger Week here in Halifax for the ninth consecutive year. Burger Week starts on Thursday, October 14th and goes to Saturday, October 23rd. Burgers have been a staple here in the construction industry in Atlantic Canada for decades. Everyone knows that production goes up with a little bit of protein, and with a good burger at lunch, everybody's just getting along that much better on the construction site. Burger Week has raised over $560,000 over the last eight years.

0:38And this year there are 144 participating locations. 130 of these locations will be donating to Feed Nova Scotia on every burger sold. This year's presenting sponsor is Fine Company Brewing, brewed in Moncton, New Brunswick. Fine Company offers an IPA, blonde, and rattler, only sold in the Maritimes. You can find more info on burgerweek.co. Okay, let's get into today's episode. All right, welcome back to the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Today we have our first guest under the category of engineering firms, in Design Point Engineering and Surveying Limited.

1:18DesignPoint's a professional engineering and surveying firm specializing in civil projects, new land developments, municipal engineering, stormwater design, flood, and many other things as well. So our guests today are Neil Fougere to the left and Evan Teasdale to the right, both professional engineers. Evan was born in Nova Scotia and is a graduate from StFX, and Neil Fougere was born in Cape Breton and he's a graduate of Dalhousie. Thanks for being here, guys. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for

1:59having us here. Yeah, so usually we just kind of start with a little bit of your personal journey in the industry. So maybe Evan, you want to just kick us off and tell us a little bit about how things progressed after graduating from StFX? Sure, sure. Yeah, I graduated, did my diploma at StFX. I'm from Maniganish, so it made sense to go there for my first two years of engineering. Then I came up to Halifax and did the rest of it at

2:29Dalhousie. I did a couple of co-op terms, some in Alberta, some in New Brunswick, but really wanted to stay focused in Nova Scotia. So right after graduation, went to work with what was then Terrain Group, then became GENIVAR and WSP through its progression. Stayed there for seven or eight years, and then I went over to try my hand at HRM — did a couple of years at HRM under the planning and development and infrastructure planning departments. And then after a while I just wanted to kind of

3:06get back to the roots of consulting, and an opportunity came up with DesignPoint. So I've been there since 2017 and loving it ever since. Yeah, so with DesignPoint now, are you heavily involved with the wastewater treatment side of things, for developers, on the civil end of things? Is that kind of your focus? Yeah, I wear a lot of different hats at DesignPoint. Certainly on the wastewater treatment side, I do a lot of unserviced development stuff, so a lot of

3:37septic systems in unserviced development areas. I also do a lot of municipal infrastructure within the serviced realm as well. It's kind of split between linear infrastructure and vertical infrastructure, so I do a lot of the pump stations that come with the wastewater side of things as well. Okay, and Neil, you're a grad from Dalhousie as well, and were also at WSP for a bit? Yeah, basically followed the same path as Evan. I started with Terrain Group, GENIVAR, WSP,

4:10I was there for 13 years and then left in 2019 to join DesignPoint. Nice. Yeah, and so your focus — is that a specific thing with DesignPoint now, or again different hats, similar to Evan? Do a lot of different things — mostly land development type projects, commercial and residential, multi-unit buildings, residential subdivisions. We've done some energy projects, some wind farm developments recently. Out in BC was the last one I worked on. Right. Any of those in Atlantic Canada that

4:45you're involved with? Not recently, but I have been in the past, like the South Canoe wind farm, here in Nova Scotia. Yeah, that was in Nova Scotia. That was a pretty large scale — it's like 100 megawatt wind farm. You guys weren't involved in any of the wind development in Prince Edward Island? No, not to this point. Right. The other thing that we're kind of taking off on lately has been solar here in Nova Scotia, so we've been doing a lot of the civil

5:08works for solar farms around. Yeah, so maybe take us through — I know you've both been with DesignPoint for the last few years. Is that correct? Yeah, yeah. And you know, just a little bit about the company, because it's — it was originated, I think, 2014, so it'd be six or seven years now. And maybe just tell us a little about the founders and then the company in general. So I know you're going through a lot of growth right now.

5:37Yeah, we've certainly seen a lot of growth, so it's been fun and exciting. The company, like you say, started in 2014. There are three founding principals — they were again part of the Terrain Group / GENIVAR / WSP. They just wanted to get back to their roots of sort of that locally owned organization. So it started with the three of them, it quickly grew. Like I say, I came on board in 2017 — I was employee number 12 — and now we're up to almost 50. We've got a pretty wide

6:16range of services, from surveying right through almost a full suite of engineering and expanding disciplines all the time. So it's been a fun journey. Yeah, and just on the topic of growth, I was saying to Neil just before on air that I know your cousin a little bit, Lee Fougere, and I know he just started there about a month ago now. So trying to build a geotechnical side of things. And it just kind of speaks to — you guys are in the hiring

6:44mode and looking for more. I know we've been trying for a long time to actually start the geotechnical division, so we were pretty excited to have Lee on board. Hired another geotechnical engineer recently, so yeah, we're looking to grow that whole division. Can we name the three owners, the three founders, just for a shout out? Yeah, sure. The three founders were Kevin Brown, senior surveyor; Andrew Forsythe, senior civil engineer; and Glenn Woodford, another senior civil engineer. It's going to be a satisfying time for them to see how things progressed

7:13and go from three people to 50 in a short time, and then still moving forward and growing and hiring people. Yeah, yeah. I know it's been an exciting time for us to be part of it and along for the ride, and we certainly owe a lot of it to their success, for sure. Sure. So you mentioned a little bit about the services. Evan, maybe just talk a little bit for our listeners, whether they're in the industry or not — and I know we have

7:39clients in government and municipalities but also lots of developers and stuff like that — so maybe just kind of talk a little bit about your client base and who they are. Yeah, for sure. So we do touch a lot of industries and we have a huge service offering. In a typical year, I would say we're almost 50/50 between government contracts and private contracts. On the government side, we touch all levels, whether it's municipal, federal, or

8:11on the private side we're doing a lot of land development projects, so whether that's new subdivisions or whether it's new infill site development downtown. We touch a lot of aspects of it. On the surveying side it can start with legal boundary surveys, topographic surveys, the whole suite. Yeah, and then into the engineering side we do the site civil grading, the drainage, the servicing, the geotech, and even some structural as well. So yeah, seeing your surveying — even leasehold surveys to BCLS standards and mining surveys,

8:47condominium surveys — it's kind of endless. Yeah, all kinds of fun specialty surveys for sure. We do 3D scanning, underwater surveys — yeah, we touch a huge range. Yeah, a lot of different scales of projects too, right, from a single residential house to 10, 15 story buildings. We are involved in residential housing for clients too. Yeah, so we do grading plans and drainage plans for a small house, or location certificates. Yeah, so maybe — and we were talking before a little bit about some of the bigger

9:18developers that you're working with around the city. You mentioned Armour Group and the Westway projects and the Bedford. Right, yeah, and done some work with Southwest, so you're downtown on a lot of the bigger jobs too. So right from the small residential to the major. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we touch a lot of land development projects. A lot of them come to us where a developer or a landowner has a big tract of land, starts out in the survey realm where they may not know what they have, and

9:48then we kind of take it all the way up from there to a full development. Yeah, your land development portfolio services — I mean, you can take it right from site inspections and contracted men down to the civil, water and wastewater management and all those things. Yeah, all those fun things. So yes, maybe just talk a little bit about the areas that both of you are focused on within the company, and maybe is there any kind of interesting projects that you've

10:19worked on in the recent past or not so recent past, or that are happening now or coming up? Yeah, so for me, again I wear a lot of different hats inside of DesignPoint. One day I'm doing the civil infrastructure world, the next day I'm doing structural or even the building science with some of the passive house and high performance buildings that we do. So we've done a number of high-performance buildings where we've used them as a kind of a case study, to the point where we've got the energy

10:56usage for heating and cooling at least down to a point where you can almost heat the house with a hair dryer. So that one's been pretty fun to work on. And so with passive housing, is that something that you've started to specialize in recently? And you've got a certificate — and that's a rare thing, right? There's not a lot of — yeah, that's right. There's kind of a small group of passive house enthusiasts and certified passive house designers locally. We've got some really good pioneers locally in the

11:26passive house realm. So I kind of picked it up out of personal interest, and you can kind of see the writing on the wall when it comes to building codes and energy efficiency. So it's kind of nice to be at the forefront of that. And so I got my certification through the International Passive House Institute a couple years ago, and we've been working on a few projects to boost that locally. Yeah, and I think obviously it's even more

11:54of a focus having been in Atlantic Canada, with energy poverty and the 10% of household income spent toward energy, and how it's kind of double here on the east coast from the west coast. Right. Yeah, it's really quite interesting when you look at energy use in the home and how much Atlantic Canadians spend on energy use in the home to heat and cool their house. We spend almost double the national average for heating and cooling

12:24costs. And that's a function of our housing stock — we have some relatively old housing stock. And is it a function of the climate as well? Yeah, it's part of that for sure, hard to measure, but yeah. That one's certainly a broader topic, but a lot of it is just poor housing stock, you know, or the conditions because of the age. Yeah, yeah. And sometimes the material, sometimes the building methods and all those things. Yeah, it's funny — my first house I

12:58bought, and I did some renovations too. When I opened up the wall it was insulated with newspaper and seaweed, so — you know, that's the kind of stock we're dealing with in some of the outlying communities for sure. I wonder if it was in the spec! It probably was. Yeah. So what about sustainable development, low impact development, green infrastructure, stormwater management, climate change — that kind of side of things? Yeah, so recently there's

13:31been a change in the regulation to look more at providing treatment to stormwater and looking at low impact development. So we've been working on a lot of projects recently where we're looking at new technologies to manage our stormwater on site and treat it before it gets discharged to the municipal system. Because eventually all those systems drain to either a lake or a river or an ocean, so we want to treat the water before it gets to that system so it's nice and clean

13:58and doesn't cause any damage to our environment. Right. Some methods include using a bioswale, for instance, which is like a ditch but it has plant species in there specifically designed to remove sediment from the stormwater and kind of polish the stormwater so that it's cleaner when it discharges. One of the neat jobs we've done in terms of stormwater management lately is a watercourse rehabilitation program going on in Dartmouth. It was a natural watercourse at one

14:34point, but through decades of development it got pinched off, moved, and man-altered to the point where it was retaining walls on either side, straight lines, not much of a habitat for natural wildlife. So we've gone in there and we've naturalized the stream bed. We've taken out the retaining walls, we've added natural stone lining for the bottom and vegetation for habitat and environment. Nova Scotia Environment and DFO have kind of used it as a bit of a pilot program for how to

15:12take these man-made structures and rehabilitate them into a naturalized channel. So that's been a really fun and rewarding project from a green infrastructure perspective. Wow. What about the housing market and how you're supporting the current state? Yeah, I mean, like I say, we do a lot of land development projects and the big crunch right now in terms of these subdivisions and whatnot — for our listeners, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And inventory is a big thing, it's

15:48basic supply and demand. So we're out there and we're developing these subdivisions in a sustainable fashion so that we can increase the supply to the inventory. Yeah. Take us through a little bit of that process — like when a developer owns a portion of a subdivision or owns a portion of land that has been planned in the preliminary phases of creating a subdivision. So you guys are involved right from the front, kind of with the municipality, with the

16:23plot plan and then on through all the civil, all the wastewater — everything from point zero. And the developer comes to you first, after approval from the municipality, and then away you go? Well, during the process, yeah, even before that. Like a lot of times we'll have a client come in that just owns a piece of land and comes and says, what can I do with it? They have no idea what any of the regulations are, the land use bylaws. So

16:54we can kind of walk them through those. Like, for example, whether or not they need a perk test, whether a foundation is going to hold up there, or if they can put a well there, if it's got to be connected to municipal water, or even what type of housing they can build. Can we do a single family? Can we do a multi-unit family development or some semi-detached houses? And then is it serviced or is it unserviced? Yeah, and kind of walk them

17:18through every step of the process from basically the raw piece of land until we build the roads and we do all the inspection, all the testing, and all the underground infrastructure — basically a turnkey package so they can sell the lots and have somebody build a house on them. And that includes cost estimating for all the civil works and the road paving and all the access, like any of the costs involved. So you're kind of budgeting those projects for those people too? Exactly. So they

17:44can develop a pro forma and then they can decide if they want to move forward with the construction, even at that point. Yeah, we work with a lot of local contractors in sort of fine-tuning some of that stuff, and we also do a lot of contract admin between the owner and the contractors, right? So we're sort of that impartial third party. Right. How's the labour shortage affecting you guys? It's pretty much affecting everybody in the industry, whether you're an engineering firm or contractor developer. Yeah, it's

18:14really true. You know, certainly the trades are feeling it these days — it's hard to get trades — but we're also feeling it on the technical side in engineering, you know, trying to find good qualified engineering techs is a challenge. We've heard that there's fewer than 10 new students in the NSCC engineering tech program lately. It's a real challenge — there's a huge market void there that we should be cautious of. Yeah, I think you guys were saying beforehand that there's three or

18:50five recruitment positions out there now for DesignPoint. For any engineering grads that are listening right now, absolutely — give us a call, by all means. Yeah, and even just getting the word out there about our industry and that it's a great profession to be in. You actually get to draw things on paper and then get to see them come to life and become a reality. So it's kind of a very rewarding process.

19:17Right. All right, you mentioned earlier, Neil, about wind farms, and you're working on one in BC and you've done one here in Nova Scotia. Which one was that again? So the one in Nova Scotia was the South Canoe wind farm. Okay. How many wind mills — that was 29 turbines? Right, so it was nearly 100 megawatt development. So kind of for something to scale it — like the Pointe Lepreau nuclear power plant, it's a 250 megawatt generator. So this is, you know,

19:47something that roughly produces half the amount of electricity as a nuclear power plant. So it's a pretty significant development from that perspective. Yeah, that's a large output too. And like, when it comes to wind farms, I think you know it's one of those — compared to solar and some other renewable energies, the capacity factor is pretty high, right, for what it's able to actually produce. The only trouble with them is it's not consistent on its own — you know, you're only generating power when the

20:13wind's blowing. You're at the mercy of Mother Nature. So talk a little bit about that — how is it different when you guys are designing wind farm access roads and crane pads and lay-down areas and stuff? How's that different from designing a subdivision, just for our listeners who maybe aren't in the engineering field but are developers or are just curious about the angle of things? Like, how would it be different from a normal subdivision? The biggest

20:42difference is basically the equipment that has to deliver the turbine components. So like, the blades on some of these turbines are 150 feet long. Your regular tractor trailer has a 55-foot box, so this is three times as long, right? So the roads need to have a gentle radius and you can't have too much grade change from a vertical perspective. So that's really the biggest challenge — how do we get the equipment into the sites and then erect the turbines? Right, you gotta have the right access.

21:10Yeah. You don't want one of those trucks driving into the ditch because your road wasn't wide enough. You know, I think that's one of the aesthetic factors about wind farms — you see them off in the distance on the horizon and stuff and they actually look pretty aesthetically pleasing the way they're designed. But I don't think we realize how big they are from the highway driving by. No, you don't

21:36get a true appreciation until you're standing underneath one. Yeah, exactly. Is there any plans you guys are aware of for more wind farms planning here in the province or in Atlantic Canada that you're hearing of? Not lately. There was a program in recent years that allowed a lot of these developers to do single turbines and they could sign a power purchase agreement with Nova Scotia Power to sell their power. Yeah, but that program has since ceased to exist, so that's really curbed the

22:06development on those too. Yeah, unfortunately. Yes. I wonder — I wonder if we haven't seen a major developer in Atlantic Canada just with a project adding a little bit, like a turbine or two. Like, we haven't seen that, right? No, and it really is a challenge because a lot of people don't want to have those things in their backyards. Yeah. I think really where we could see that industry change would be on the solar front, and you're seeing it a lot in the city where

22:35people are putting solar panels up on their houses and generating their own electricity. Right. So you mentioned solar earlier — maybe we can talk a little more about that. How busy are you guys on the solar side of things? Is it just residential houses or are you seeing it in commercial? It's really everything. We're flat out in it. We do a ton of single-family residential applications. In those cases we do a structural

23:02analysis of the roof to make sure it can handle the extra load. We also do big commercial facilities — if you've got a large warehouse with a big flat roof, maybe you've got some good opportunities there for solar installations. So again we do the structural analysis for those components. And we also do ground-based solar farms as well, so we're doing a few big ones around — from Parks Canada through Nova Scotia Power, the whole nine yards. So some real good opportunities in that realm for sure. Right. And the

23:37geotechnical division with DesignPoint is kind of a new thing you guys are rolling out now too? Oh, sorry — geotechnically, yeah. Yeah, that's a new exciting field for us. It goes hand in hand with a lot of the civil infrastructure that we do. We're doing the grading, we're doing the structural, we're doing now the geotech — so all of it sort of blends together, which is quite nice. And it's exciting to see that take off.

24:06Can we talk a little bit about traffic and transportation engineering and some of the challenges there, and some of the areas that you've done here in HRM, Nova Scotia, in that regard? Yeah, so we've got — again it speaks to growth — but we've got a small but growing transportation group. Ellen, our lead transportation engineer — I wish she was here for this. But yeah, that's another exciting development group for our company. Yeah, I see written here traffic impact studies and active transportation

24:41planning, pedestrian safety, site access, parking lot layout — there's so many different things. And again, it touches all aspects of the development world, right? Whether it's private developers who need a traffic impact statement for their development, or if it's HRM — we're doing a major review of their bus stops for accessibility right now. That's a major project for us. And traffic circles or whatever. Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of it. We're going to see some major

25:16changes with the Moving Forward Together plan from HRM. They have some major changes coming to their transportation network and how they approach the design of that infrastructure. There's a mentality change coming — it's no longer focused solely on cars, right? So now we're seeing multimodal transportation networks establishing, and we're excited about some of the shifts that are critical path calculations in there. Yeah, all that fun stuff. Yeah, maybe Evan, we can get back

25:55to the passive housing, and even for some of our listeners who might be outside the industry but are homeowners and thinking about building homes — we hear that term passive house a lot and a lot of people maybe aren't sure exactly what that's referring to, in terms of affordability and that sort of thing. Yeah, so I mean passive house — there's a lot of misconceptions about passive houses. It's kind of shrouded in mystery, but it doesn't really need to be. It's about as simple as it

26:22can be, really, when it comes to housing. And in terms of affordability, it truly is the best long-term life cycle cost. Passive house was founded on economic principles — it was about finding the most efficient construction methodology that yielded the most economically beneficial house to live in. And it's focused on occupant comfort and just optimizing your design, really. So the nice thing about passive house is that it sets the target — there's a standard that sets a target, but it

27:02doesn't tell you how to get there. And so there are really five key principles that it's based on. And they are: super-insulated buildings, so the walls are often quite thick. What would be the R-value of that building envelope that you're referring to? Again, it's all about optimization, but generally speaking they're like R-50, so they're quite thick. They're super airtight, so for a typical code-built home, you might blow in a blower door test — you might do three air changes an hour, even more. Some

27:41of the older homes that we've blown are like seven and ten air changes an hour. Passive house targets 0.6 air changes an hour. Our 2000 NC contacts was one and a half. Yeah. So super airtight. How do you maintain that with the glazing, with the windows and the window frames? Is that the specialized materials that are required? Yeah, so that's another component of passive house — high performance windows and doors. And that means they're usually triple-glazed,

28:13super-insulated frames, there's no thermal bridging in the frames. You need to have a continuous seal between your window — so the window itself forms part of the air barrier system. So they're really tight-locking windows and doors as well. The next principle would be the HVAC system. It's usually a very high performance HVAC system. With a house that is that airtight, you still have to have good fresh air in and out, good air exchange — good air exchange with heat recovery, right? So that's a big component. You know, there's this myth

28:50about a house being so tight that there's no fresh air in the house and you can't open a window in a passive house. But it's just not true. Yeah. And the windows are, I guess, just as important too, because you're trying to benefit from that natural sunlight and heat. Yeah, have those larger glazing areas. Yeah, exactly. But not sacrifice the R-value in the envelope — it's all about the balance, right? And one of the myths about passive houses is: well, if I

29:17don't have a south-facing wall, then I can't get any good glazing and solar gains. But it's all about compromise and being careful with how you place those windows — how and where — and you've got to make up for it in other areas. Maybe you've got a thicker wall if you've got a lot of north-facing glazing, but you don't want to give up a good view just because it's to the north, right? So it's all about careful design and putting your money where you get the

29:44biggest bang for your buck. Yeah, anything to add, Neil? Just on top of that — it's really that there's nothing different about building a passive house. It's all the same construction materials. It's like Evan saying: it's just having a better plan before you put your construction into action, so that you come up with a better finished product at the end of the day. Yeah, again, it's all about where you put your money. People think that passive house construction needs to be expensive, and it generally is in this world so far,

30:14because the people that have clung on to passive house are looking for high performance but also that high quality — so it's sort of a high-end custom residential that's doing the passive house. But it doesn't need to be, right? There are some groups locally that are trying to implement passive house on a large scale, make it more repeatable, and all of those things, to bring it back to the economic benefit. Yeah. So if anyone's listening and they're

30:48thinking about a new home built in the passive house realm, they can reach out to you guys and get some help with the design? Yeah. And then is there any government programs now for funding in that regard? Yeah, there is. Yeah, so there's a lot of government programs now that give rebates for high performance housing. You can get up to — I think it's $9,000 in the current program still. So a lot of time that covers the design

31:16fees and some extra construction costs as well, so it can be very helpful. Definitely — if somebody's looking to build a home that they're going to be in — that can sustain a bit of a turnaround time. If you're building a house for 25 years, this thing's going to pay for itself, right? Yeah, that's amazing, it's great stuff. I'm sure that will perk up some of the ears of our listeners that are thinking about passive housing, have an interest in it, and are on the verge of building. So

31:45that's great. Yeah, by all means reach out. I see erosion here under renewable energy — I don't know if I read something recently, could be totally wrong, but that's kind of an issue here in Nova Scotia. You guys are involved a little bit in erosion and sedimentation control plans and stuff. Is that a hot topic right now? Yeah, that kind of goes to what Neil was talking about earlier in the whole stormwater management, right? It's a big deal on construction sites. So I know we just

32:10— yeah, we're building a lot in the city, right on the water, downtown, but obviously the peninsula. Even in the downtown areas you have to provide some amount of erosion and sedimentation control protection. So when you're making your excavations for your buildings, you have stormwater or groundwater seeping into those excavations, and you want to treat it before you send it out into the environment as well. So there's multiple different ways you can do that — by putting it through some

32:39filtration systems, making sure all the infrastructure on the street is protected by putting — what are called silt sacks — in all the catch basins, so that any dirt from the site isn't going into the storm system. So even in the urban environment it's a concern and a requirement for a lot of projects. Right. Yeah, can you give us like a little bit of a breakdown or an overview — just talk for a minute about some of these large projects that are built right on the water? Like, how

33:07how deep are these foundations able to go for parkades and stuff, and how does that get done? I mean, that's a bit outside of our specialty. Like, once you start talking about — for example, Queen's Marque was — you're essentially building a big barge, so they've got to worry about the thing floating if they have too much parking underground. So that's a major challenge — it's a major specialty that's a bit outside our reach. Right. The same idea if it was a smaller

33:37subdivision right on the water or something too — just a smaller scale. Yeah. And nowadays in particular they're bringing in a lot of regulations as far as how close you can build. What is that regulation now — is it 100 feet from the water line? There's a tool that's been developed by CBCL to assess the erosion capacity of the soil, or erodibility of the soil. So it depends on the soil conditions and elevations, and it depends on what the soil is,

34:09what ingredients are in the soil, how fast it's going to erode. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot more to it. Wouldn't that be the same around the whole perimeter of the coastline here in the province? No, not necessarily. If you go Peggy's Cove way, you have that nice beautiful granite rock — that stuff has been there for thousands of years. But then you get into areas where you have a sandy soil or a clay type soil, which erodes very quickly. And in the same

34:31regard, like, we have to blast for a lot of projects downtown because the bedrock is so hard in those areas for foundations. Yeah, other areas don't have to. So it's a blessing and a curse sometimes. Exactly. From a structural perspective, having nice hard rock underneath your building is a good thing — you can reduce the size of your footings and save some money that way. But then, like you're saying, there's costs for blasting and the permitting requirements to blast are a lot more stringent than if you're

34:57just excavating. So there's definitely pluses and minuses. Yeah. We had Heritage Gas on a couple of weeks ago for an episode recording and they were talking about just some of the property line barriers, you know, to them running their lines and their infrastructure. And there's a lot of governing policies when it comes to property lines, whether you're separating a subdivision or whether it's a large commercial building downtown. There's so much. And you guys are highly involved in that kind of

35:28stuff too with your surveying and that kind of thing, right? Yeah, totally. It's a big deal, especially in a downtown street. There's a lot of infrastructure that's under these streets and so the real estate within those streets is really valuable — there's interference. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so knowing where those utilities are, whether it's gas, power, communications, water, sewer, the whole nine yards — it all comes together. And so for our listeners, like, when you're dealing with that scenario, there's a log of anything that's

35:58been done throughout the process on a piece of land. It's logged in a plot plan and those kinds of things. So when you're working with the developers, you're having to deal with the municipality to find out where things are at before you start construction. Yeah, we certainly — HRM and Halifax Water do a great job of this, they have a good record of their infrastructure. It's not always accurate, right? Some of this stuff is hundreds of years old, so

36:25a lot of it has to come up and be exposed. But we generally work with a lot of utility locate companies — they'll mark it out on the ground, we'll survey it, and then we add it to our drawing so that we have a pretty good idea of where it is. Yeah, so you're in communication with all these other companies that are involved. And that's basically the first step in the process for a lot of these developments — you go and collect all

36:49the data and kind of put it all in one spot so you can see what all the challenges are, what all the interferences are like you mentioned, and then come up with solutions to work around all those challenges. Sounds like a daunting task just for the first step. It can be. Like, even as Evan mentioned, a lot of times we have no clue where stuff is — there's infrastructure that's been in the ground since the 1800s in Halifax, right? Can you tell us any specific

37:15projects where you ran into some old stuff under there — from a couple hundred years old? Almost all the time, like a lot of times. What is it? What is it that you're — sometimes we don't know. Sometimes we expose pipes that we don't know what they are, and it turns out to be an old abandoned pipe. We've got to scope a camera down through it and chase it back

37:41and a lot of times it could end up just being an old abandoned pipe. Yeah. Right. Like, for instance, in the downtown, all the street lights used to be lit using gas, so there's old gas lines buried in some of the streets. And you dig into them and a lot of people didn't even know that was a thing back in the past. Really? Yeah. And there's old tram lines, old roads — so you never know what you're going to run into when you start digging

38:06up the ground. Yeah, that's very interesting. I see — you mentioned, Neil and Evan, a little bit about regulations, and you know, just kind of the challenges there — lots of conflict, so many players involved. And like you mentioned before, there's so much interference, whether things are logged or not, you never know what's under there. When you start working with a homeowner and developer on some projects, so yeah, maybe just talk a little bit

38:36about that and the governance, and how it can really be tough. It can be. So like you're saying, there are so many different players that you need to talk to for approval. For instance, when we're building a subdivision, we deal with HRM to get subdivision approvals, but we also go to bodies like NS Transportation, Nova Scotia Environment, and I don't know what else — yeah, Nova Scotia Power, all the different utilities, Bell Aliant,

39:06so there's definitely lots of stakeholders. Yeah, kind of trying to make every one of them happy is often a challenge on some of these projects, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah. They often — it's a challenge, like you say. There are so many parties at the table — trying to satisfy everybody can be a challenge, and getting people to commit to turnaround times on reviews. And if there's conflicts, sometimes they have different views on what they want and where they want it. So you guys have

39:35timelines too, already, just like a contractor would, right? Like, you're subject — it's not like you have all the time in the world to get these issues figured out either. Right, right. Yeah, so it's a challenge for sure. Like I say, bringing people to the table — it's a matter of getting the right people at the table to make those conversations move forward. And the approval time frames can lag for sure. Yeah, yeah. That's definitely one of the challenges. Anyone in particular

40:03or one or two that are just harder than the rest it seems, often or not? Well, we always seem to struggle with a lot of the government agencies. The private companies are usually a lot easier to deal with. I think the big challenge right now is there's just the volume of work that's happening in the city — you can count the number of cranes in the sky when you drive through town. So everybody's busy. Yeah, and it's hard to try to find time and focus on one

40:29task and get it completed. And obviously with government, it's a systematic approach, and with some of the private stuff it's not so much, and that can just be because of the structure that's necessary. I mean, yeah. No, and like I say, that's one conversation that we have a lot on the projects we're working on — you know, how do we get approvals on this? We seem to spend more time talking about that than we do about, you know,

40:54how can we make this project better? How can we deliver a better end product to the client that's ultimately going to buy it at the end of the day? All right. It's like, right off the bat, it's just going to be really hard and drawn out to get that approval. So you spend a lot of time strategizing on the best way to get things started so you can meet those timelines — like, what approval do we need to get

41:14first? We need to get this permit or that permit so we can start digging and just get the project off the ground, and then kind of worry about the rest later, just to try to keep things on schedule. That's definitely a big challenge, and there's been a lot of growing frustration within the development community on that topic, I'm sure. Definitely. You're not the only ones. Yeah, like you said, it's so busy right now and everyone is, you know,

41:40it's their projects, their focus, and there's another ten of those situations going on simultaneously. That's right. Anything else you guys want to kind of touch on before we wrap up? I know we kind of covered a lot of ground there in a short amount of time. We didn't drill into everything too much — there just isn't time. But you know, maybe just a little bit about where you see things headed. Obviously you mentioned that DesignPoint Engineering and Surveying

42:07Limited is obviously growing a lot. Any exciting projects that are coming up that you want to promote or just mention that you guys are excited to work on? Many, many, many. Yeah, like Neil said, everybody's busy and there's a lot of activity on the go, so it's certainly an exciting time to be in this industry. We're growing our disciplines, so I'm quite excited to see how they take off — relatively new disciplines being the

42:42transportation side, structural — the fact that we're able to bring all of those services to the table on a development project really helps to create this cohesive, comprehensive team. Yeah, that's almost somewhat unique. I mean, there are other engineering firms that are obviously really diverse and offer a lot of services, but you guys seem to have a lot of ground covered there. Yeah, the big thing for us, like you say, is we've got those services, we've got them locally, all with local experts who

43:18know the local soils — our soils guys know the local soils and our civil guys know the local regulations. Having those local experts all on one team can really help a developer. And it's just a really great industry — I go to work excited every day. You get to do something different, so much variety. Yeah, so it's constantly learning. Yeah, exactly. And just if anybody's out there thinking about it, it's a great industry to get into. And like we were mentioning before, there's lots of demand for people, so

43:56yes. And Lee — your cousin Lee Fougere was telling me that, obviously just starting with DesignPoint, how much he likes it there. Just tell us — maybe in closing — just tell us a little bit about DesignPoint and working there. Like, what's the best part for you guys? Like you said, it's just a treat to go in every day, excited to be there, a good team environment — that kind of thing? Yeah, definitely. For me the best part is

44:21the people. We've really got a great team. We've got the good mix of good senior staff who really understand things and are really helpful in mentoring our junior staff, and we've got a great team of junior people who are coming on board all the time. So it's just a really friendly and diverse atmosphere. We're all one big team. We have this sort of open-door policy — the senior guys, like I say, they're out mentoring a fair bit.

44:57They're always there for questions, so it's just a really good environment to work in. That's probably the best thing for me. Yeah, trying to transfer your knowledge to some of the young folks and kind of get them excited about the process and excited about working, just like we are. So that's fun, and it's kind of great to watch people progress through their career, see the change, and how they become a valued member of our team. It's amazing. Evan Teasdale and Neil Fougere with DesignPoint

45:30Engineering and Surveying — thanks so much for doing this, guys, and coming in and talking about the industry and DesignPoint and your personal journeys and just some of the things that have been challenging. It's been a great conversation. Appreciate you guys coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for having us. It's fun. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Be sure to follow us on any podcast platform you use. You can also find us on LinkedIn and

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