Scott Vandegrift—2013 Managerial Engineer of the Year

Scott Vandegrift has more than 26 years of construction, engineering, and management experience, ranging from his start as a construction laborer to his current position supervising the engineering and lands sections at the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests.

Scott is recognized for his leadership in maximizing organizational efficiency and for his work in solving “the roads dilemma.” He volunteered to develop and pilot the Travel Analysis Process (TAP) for the Southern Region, completing a forest–wide plan that was published with the George Washington National Forest Plan Revision.

Scott realizes the importance of roads, not only to engineering, but to the success of the entire Forest Service mission. As a result, he has adopted and passionately promoted a philosophy of betterment, increased maintenance, and more efficiency.

Scott is using information and the results of the TAP analysis to:

• Communicate, communicate, and communicate
• Proactively tell the story of the Forest Service roads situation to local congressmen and their staffs, stakeholders, the Virginia Department of Transportation, and the public
• Use outside funding for various projects that include road improvement and decommissioning projects
• Change private property owners’, stakeholders’, and the public’s response from, “it’s been done this way for 30 years” to “I understand why you are changing”
• Change the maintenance jurisdictions on over 100 miles of high–use roads
• Develop road maintenance agreements for private property owners to take over certain maintenance responsibilities to maintain roads at higher standards
• Develop new permit standards for special–use permitees to shift the road maintenance burden away from the Forest Service
• Develop road maintenance priorities and mitigation strategies for high–risk roads

Scott has also streamlined the forest–level core engineering organization, changing decades of past functional area practices and focusing on operational support to rangers and the public. A key component of the new organization is improving infrastructure maintenance through:

• Reduced overhead at the forest level
• Better contracting tools
• More resources for maintenance force account “militias”
• Pushing a strategy where the true needs on the ground are prioritized

Scott has a varied background. He served as a combat engineer while enlisted with the U.S. Marine Corps in the Middle East during the first Gulf War and later supervised a carpentry shop before moving west to go to college.

After graduating from Montana State University and being commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Army, he moved to Anchorage, AK, to work as a project engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Scott designed and managed Arctic engineering projects, such as ice bridges, to transport construction materials and supplies to remote areas in Alaska.

Scott left Alaska and moved to Texas for a brief stint as an engineering manager in the private sector. He joined the Forest Service in 1999 as the facilities engineer at the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho and also served as a zone engineer at the Idaho Panhandle National Forest until 2008.

He returned to the east coast after 20 years out west to take a position with the National Park Service as the deputy chief of maintenance for Shenandoah National Park. He returned to the Forest Service in 2009 in his current position and is happy being engaged in solving the unique challenges we face as an engineering group.

Scott has enjoyed the support of his wife Simona throughout his career. They have two adult children and one soon–to–be–college–bound teenager. When not hanging out with his family, Scott can be found either on his bicycle or in his backyard, where he enjoys growing food on every foot of usable space.