Marco Cusano – McElhanney Ltd.

Complex infrastructure problems rarely announce themselves at convenient times. They emerge in active campuses, busy neighborhoods, and aging utility corridors where risk, regulation, and public safety intersect. Marco Cusano has built his career around stepping into those moments with structure, speed, and coordinated technical execution. As division manager for McElhanney, he aligns civil, environmental, survey, and specialty teams to move projects from concept through construction.

McElhanney is a diversified, multi-disciplinary engineering services firm with deep regional strength across British Columbia and Alberta. The company traces its origins back more than a century in surveying and has since expanded into transportation, utilities, land development, environmental services, electrical systems, planning, and related technical fields. Its operating model emphasizes integrated delivery across internal service groups, so clients work with a coordinated team rather than fragmented consultants. That mid-sized, regionally embedded structure gives the firm both technical depth and local responsiveness.

Career path shaped by reputation & relationships

Cusano’s path to his current leadership role did not begin inside a consulting office. He was working as a consultant project manager supporting the City of Chilliwack, leading capital and design-build programs, where he repeatedly encountered McElhanney teams on winning bids and successful assignments. Consistent performance built familiarity and trust between Cusano and a McElhanney branch manager, which eventually turned into a recruitment conversation.

“I kept seeing them execute well and follow through on what they promised,” Cusano says.

He briefly accepted a role with WSP to broaden his exposure and experience, but the earlier connection stayed active. After weighing long-term fit and growth opportunity, he chose to join McElhanney in 2020. The move aligned with his preference for collaborative delivery and field-oriented engineering.

His academic foundation combines technical and business training. Cusano earned his engineering degree from the University of British Columbia and later completed an MBA at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business. Since 2009, he has held progressive engineering and project management roles before stepping into division management.

Integrated engineering as a delivery engine

Today, Cusano leads a compact core team of three engineers, but the effective delivery footprint is much larger. His group functions as a hub within McElhanney’s broader matrix, pulling in transportation, environmental, hydraulic, electrical, and survey specialists as project demands expand. Civil engineering often anchors that coordination because of its central role in permitting, approvals, utility design, and construction staging.

“Civil tends to sit at the center because we are touching approvals, utilities, and constructability all at once,” Cusano explains.

Transportation work remains a major anchor for the organization, including highway studies and design, but Cusano’s portfolio extends into campus infrastructure, municipal utilities, and unconventional asset strategies. He describes the firm’s advantage as nimble scale combined with bench strength. Larger firms can struggle to mobilize quickly at the regional level or adapt staffing without delay.

That responsiveness shows up in how teams are assembled. Cusano focuses on matching the right technical specialists to the problem set, then aligning scope, schedule, and risk controls early. The approach reduces redesign cycles and compresses decision timelines for owners.

Emergency response & campus-scale renewal

One of the most defining programs under Cusano’s leadership is the multi-year civil upgrade portfolio at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. The program represents roughly $40–50 million in infrastructure renewal across an active campus with aging utilities and complex road networks. Work includes phased replacements, new services, and surface improvements sequenced to maintain campus operations.

Within that program, a sudden sinkhole event became a high-stakes test of coordinated delivery. A collapse developed near a creek transition zone where an open channel entered a large culvert built decades earlier from corrugated steel. The void began small but expanded rapidly in a pedestrian plaza area, signaling progressive failure risk.

“The hole kept growing, and the history told us a quick patch would not hold,” Cusano says.

The creek is fish-bearing, which introduced strict environmental controls and permitting requirements. The team had to design bypass flows, sediment controls, and fish salvage measures while accelerating approvals. Hydraulic specialists at KWL Associates Ltd. modeled worst-case storm scenarios while environmental teams planned habitat protection steps. Construction advanced under tight timelines ahead of the wet season.

A 1-in-25-year storm struck during construction, effectively stress-testing the design assumptions in real time. Overnight monitoring tracked performance as flows increased.

“We planned for a controlled failure in the event of a worst-case storm and then watched that plan work in the field,” Cusano says.

Moving beyond the emergency work, the BCIT South Campus Infrastructure Renewal program continues to modernize water, sanitary, stormwater, electrical, telecom, and gas systems along the campus spine, followed by surfacing and landscape improvements that enhance daily campus use.

Unconventional projects & technical adaptability

Not all of Cusano’s projects involve buried pipes and roadway sections. One ongoing feasibility assignment centers on relocating a one-story ministry building constructed in the early 1990s. The 12,000 square foot structure sits on land that has changed ownership among government entities. Rather than demolishing and rebuilding, stakeholders are evaluating a physical relocation.

The concept involves disconnecting utilities, separating the building into multiple transportable sections, moving it a few hundred meters by truck, and reinstalling it on a new foundation with full-service reconnections. The strategy borrows techniques more commonly used in heritage relocations and demands specialized structural and logistics expertise.

“Sometimes the value is not in replacing the asset but in moving it intelligently,” Cusano says.

Another sensitive assignment involved a sanitary force main relocation and bypass operation near an elementary school expansion site. The pressurized sewer line served a large neighborhood, so continuous operation was mandatory. The solution required temporary bypass installation, HDPE pipe fusing, ultrasonic flow detection, and multi-stakeholder construction sequencing. Neil Smith successfully completed this work.

Goals grounded in challenge & purpose

Cusano frames motivation in practical terms. He wants projects that are interesting enough to sustain curiosity and difficult enough to demand growth.

“I want to keep working on projects that make me excited to show up and solve problems,” Cusano says.

Outside the office, his schedule revolves around family life with his wife and two young daughters. Activities, practices, and trips take priority, including a recent family visit to Disneyland. That grounding influence shapes how he views infrastructure as systems that support everyday community life.

Looking ahead, Cusano sees continued opportunity in coordinated, multi-disciplinary delivery across Western Canada, where aging infrastructure and environmental constraints intersect with growth. His approach remains steady. Build strong teams, connect the right disciplines, plan for worst-case conditions, and execute with clarity. That discipline is what allows complex projects to reach completion with confidence rather than compromise.