july2017

234 235 PREFERRED VENDOR n Terra Insurance www.terrarrg.com for our clients and, as CEO, it pains me to say that it sometimes takes precedence over finan- cial aspects.We need to make enough money to stay in business, but we don’t want the cookie cut- ter stuff.We enjoy the challenge of projects that are complicated.We want to look at it differently and develop creative solutions that add real value for clients.” “Our founder, Jim Duffield,was fond of saying, ‘We should be looking for ways to save our fee.’He believed that design is a relatively small part of the entire project cost, and it’s not difficult for us to bring an idea to the table that’s going to save the client money on construction or operation that’s more than what they pay us for our services. That’s a great aspiration that we can’t always deliver, but we do think about it a lot and hit the goal more often than we realize. “Sustainability and environmental concerns are our passions. Many of us are from the generation where we learned conservation in school and we joke that we were green before DUFFIELD ASSOCIATES, INC. it was cool.We were the nerdy conservation- ists.We have 19 LEED APs (Accredited Pro- fessional), which is a lot for a firm our size, and we try to work sustainable practices into our projects. For example, in the maritime industry, some of the cranes operating at the ports have a fair amount of emissions.We have a client facing that issue as they are in a non-attainment zone, which means they can’t contribute any more emissions. So, we came up with a separate, cleaner powering system for the other energy source at the port that would offset the new emissions. “We also have a township client that wants to restore an old mill in disrepair because it has historical and community significance.We came up with the idea, ‘It’s a mill that used to turn a turbine. Let’s drop a turbine in there and generate some power. And let’s use the power to set up an annual maintenance fund for it.’ The town’s pretty excited about the idea, and we’re looking for grants to fund this as a pilot project because old mills are pretty common in the area, and they could be saved by just reinvigorating old water power.” Looking at things differently and green… the fuel that powers Duffield Associates to succeed.