For the second straight year, ENR MidAtlantic’s Best Projects annual awards competition asked judges to select Project of the Year finalists and then select a Project of the Year. To be considered as a finalist, a project had to be a Best Project-level winner in an individual category. The following projects were finalists: Foreign Affairs Security Training Center, Best Project in the government/public building category; Winter Visual Arts Center – Franklin & Marshall College, Best Project in the higher education/research category; and Capitol Crossing, Highway, Deck, Bridge and Garage, Best Project in the highway/bridge category. The judges selected Capitol Crossing as the Project of the Year. Working on the largest remaining underdeveloped sites in Washington, D.C., the project team reestablished three city blocks in the capital’s northwest  by infilling air rights.

The two panels of industry judges reviewed nearly 100 projects from throughout the region, which includes Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia. In the end, the judges recognized 33 winning projects. This year’s judges were Dave Daquelente, executive director at Master Builders’ Association of Western Pennsylvania Inc.; Whitney S. Duffy, transportation department head and associate principal at Clark Nexsen; Peter Ege, project executive at Smoot Construction; Becky Olson, project manager at Skanska USA; and Dave Wissmann, vice president at Development Facilitators Inc. 

Judges used several criteria to evaluate projects and their teams, including ability to overcome challenges, contribution to the industry and community, safety and construction and design quality. Judges could select any combination of Best Project-level category winners and award of merit honorees. Projects had to be completed between May 1, 2019, and May 31, 2020.

Three separate safety experts—Wayne J. Creasap II, district representative, safety and health department at Iron Workers International; Bob McCall, director of safety at Master Builders’ Association of Western Pennsylvania; and Joe Schlerf, division safety manager at C3M Power Systems—served as this year’s safety judges. They reviewed 45 projects before selecting the Fairfax County Huntington Levee as the winner of the Excellence in Safety award. Despite having open trenches for more than 4,000 linear ft of buried pipe, the project had nearly 115,000 work hours with no recordable incidents or lost-time injures. The safety judges selected two awards of merit winners: The University of Brandon Avenue Green Street & Utilities Infrastructure project and Yeager Airport Runway 5 Safety Area.