The ROAR Podcast: Steve Lefton

In the late 1970s, a boy went to his first football game with his dad. The stadium was RFK. He remembers a walk up from the lot by the river, the tunnels under the stands, and the traffic. Nearly 50 years later, that same site is being rebuilt, and his firm is a lean engineer on the team doing it. His thoughts on the traffic? We're hoping to change that. Today's guest is Steve Lefton, executive chair of Kimley Horne. He calls it the largest firm you've never heard of, 11,000 people, 160 offices, engineers and planners and landscape architects doing everything on a project except the architecture. Steve studied landscape architecture and urban planning at Cornell, then started his career in Miami in the late 90s, post-Hurricane Andrew. A blighted rail yard south of downtown, a city center cut apart by highways built in the 60s. 29 years later, after a run as president and CEO, in which the firm doubled in size, he's still working on the same problem. How do you build something at an enormous scale that still belongs to the people who are already there? In this conversation, Caroline gets specific. The battery and why districts that work don't feel like projects at all. Why 100 block development can't happen without a public partner. What a Kimley Horn employee is doing on Game Bay, standing beside a police officer with an earpiece in. And why he will tell you AI is not going to replace engineers, but engineers who know how to use AI replace ones that don't. I'm Bryce Clinton, and this is Aurora Podcast.

Welcome to the Roar podcast. I'm your host, Caroline Valvardi. And with me today is Steve Lefton, executive chair at Kim Lee Horn. Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. It's great to be with you today, Caroline.

Excellent. So usually we jump in with tell us about your career and how you got to where you are today. I wanted to start out with a little bit different question for you, which some of your team, as we were preparing for the podcast office, would be a fun one, too, and I think helps tee up the rest of the conversation. They told me a little bit. I was actually visiting with the D.C. team recently, just yesterday, actually, and they were giving me a little bit of background about your story. Interest in sports, they mentioned you have a son who plays lacrosse in college. And so I wanted to just talk a little bit about if you can share what do sports mean to you?

Yeah, thank you for asking. A lot is the short answer, but sports have been a defining thread for my entire life that shaped, I think, who I am personally and professionally. If I think back, some of my best memories revolve around sports and family, right? Whether that's playing or coaching or simply being a fan. I like to think we're a family of athletes. As you mentioned, I Today, that legacy continues with my oldest son playing collegiate lacrosse. So watching that journey unfold has reinforced to me some of the lessons that sports taught me so many years ago. Sports teach you discipline, right? Through repetition, the power of habits. You have to be resilient in the face of setbacks. How do you deal with and process things like criticism and the joy that comes from working