Daleske

After two years without another engineer on the city staff besides herself, Marshalltown Public Works Director Heather Thomas is excited to welcome former Tama County Engineer Ben Daleske to her team as a Civil Engineer II and get him up to speed on a wide range of ongoing projects.

“Right now, we have numerous public works projects that we’d like to move forward, and that has not been possible using in-house staff when that position’s been vacant. So you’ve seen a lot of use of consultants, and there have been projects that have been delayed because of that vacancy,” Thomas said. “So right now, we’ll probably try to onboard and unbury ourselves a little bit from some of that backlog and then bring Ben into the realm of helping to move infrastructure forward here in the city.”

Daleske, a Class of 2010 South Hardin High School graduate, spent about 2 ½ years as the Tama County Engineer and, before that, was an assistant county engineer in northeast Iowa.

“I feel like the design work and working on projects was something that I wanted to get back into. Seeing the investment that Marshalltown’s doing in different ways with the mall and other things, I knew that this was a good place with a lot of projects going on, and I’m excited to be a part of that,” he said.

During recent meetings, some city councilors have expressed a desire to be less reliant on outside contractors and bring more operations in-house, and City Administrator Carol Webb feels that bringing Daleske on board will certainly help to do that in the long run.

“I think we’ll get there, to that point. Right now, I think some of the coordination of the projects that Heather mentioned that we need to do will kind of take precedence initially to get some of those projects going again, but I’m confident we’ll be able to do more of that work in-house in the future as well,” she said.

Overall, Daleske is looking forward to taking on a variety of projects including the Center Street viaduct, the Iowa River’s Edge Trail bridges northwest of town, and paving projects. And through his Hardin County roots and his past work in Tama County, he’s already making some “small world” connections.

“The first project that he’s gonna be really heavily involved in is the Center Street viaduct, and I was sharing his name with the contractor and he goes ‘I graduated with his brother,'” Thomas said.

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Contact Robert Maharry at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.