Company Profile
AHBL, Inc.
Company Overview
AHBL was founded in 1969 to bring a collaborative approach to the development of built environments. Our staff of 140 works together on projects of local and regional significance, serving both public and private clients from offices in Tacoma, Seattle, Tri-Cities and Spokane. AHBL is committed to creative design, cost effective solutions, capturing, and maintaining the sense of community, and integrating our area’s natural and cultural heritage into our ever-changing urban landscape. Our relationship-based practice is grounded upon the values of honesty, integrity, and making our clients’ needs our number one priority.
Our firm embraces a responsibility to contribute to our region and enhance the lives of community members that live, work, and play in or communities. As experts in civil and structural engineering, we are often called in to provide assessments of buildings or capital facility assets to determine overall condition and lifespan of buildings or exterior assets including site paving, storm ponds and other site features. Our teams help identify visible and discernable components and elements requiring maintenance, repair, replacement, upgrades, or other planned action. We have contributed to facility condition assessments for transit agencies, cities, and school districts throughout Washington state.
Company History
Headquartered in Tacoma, AHBL, Inc. began in 1969 when Noel Adams started his structural engineering firm. In the 1970s, Geoff Hodsdon and Al Bessette joined Adams to become AHB, Inc. By the end of the 80s, realizing the synergy that a multidiscipline firm could offer, the civil firm of George J. Lindsay, merged with AHB, Inc. and became AHBL, Inc.
Len Zickler joined AHBL in 1993, championing the landscape architecture and planning departments, bringing the number of disciplines that AHBL offered to four.
In the late 1990s, AHBL decided that adding surveying as a core discipline would be advantageous. J. Becker and Associates teamed with AHBL on projects for a time before they merged with us in early 2002, giving AHBL in-house surveying as a fifth discipline.
In 2001, AHBL opened a Seattle office in Pioneer Square offering planning, landscape and civil engineering to enable us to better serve our clients located in the Seattle core and further north. In the fall of 2005, we acquired Martens Chan Consulting Engineers, a small Seattle-based structural engineering firm and relocated to our current location in the Park Place Building on 6th and Seneca. In 2007, we expanded our Seattle office space and increased the size of our civil, planning and structural engineering departments.
In 2008, AHBL opened an office in Spokane. This Inland Empire office allows us to provide local civil engineering, planning and landscape architecture services to Eastern Washington.
In 2011, AHBL opened an office in Pasco to service the Tri-cities area. This office is headed by John Becker and allows us to further strengthen our presence in Eastern Washington with local land surveying, civil engineering, and planning services.
We are proud of our record of continued growth and expansion of services. We credit our success, growth, and reputation to having excellent principals and staff and to providing top-quality services to our clients. We remain committed to the idea that our future success depends on continuing these efforts and strictly adhering to the highest professional standards and ideals.