Big Las Vegas engineering firm sold

Thursday, Aug. 30, 2001 | 10:58 a.m.

A publicly traded Canadian company has signed a letter of intent to acquire an 11-year-old Las Vegas engineering firm with more than 200 employees.

Tony Franceschini, president and chief executive officer of Stantec Inc., Edmonton, Alberta, said his company's acquisition of the Pentacore Family of Companies would close by the end of October.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Pentacore, based in Las Vegas with offices in seven cities, including Mesquite, Phoenix and St. George, Utah, will adopt the Stantec name.

Franceschini said today Stantec has been in negotiations with Pentacore, whose primary office is on West Charleston Boulevard near Rainbow Boulevard, for three years.

"It's been a fairly long courtship," Franceschini said. "We've been coveting them because we wanted to be in Vegas in a bigger way. In our business, the only way to make an impact is to have a very strong local presence, so we looked at three top firms there and approached them (Pentacore). We liked the guys and, over the last three years, we've kept meeting and earlier this year, they decided they were ready."

Pentacore, the parent of eight companies that oversee different aspects of engineering in different locations, is involved in surveying, land planning and landscape architecture. Franceschini said Stantec would immediately add 15 employees to the Las Vegas operation and expand the company's involvement in water and wastewater treatment systems and highway and bridge design and engineering.

Stantec, traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange, has 3,000 employees in 40 North American offices, 16 of them in 10 U.S. states. It has a small consulting office in Las Vegas.