On an enormous construction site, the first failure is often surprisingly small. A qualified subcontractor never hears about the bid. A worker cannot figure out which training counts. A neighborhood meeting happens after the important decision. A spreadsheet records a promise in one office while another team measures something else. The crane keeps moving, but the social machinery slips a gear.
This is the territory of Modern Times, Inc., a Southern California consulting firm founded by Joseph Hernandez in 2009. MTI does not pour concrete, bend rebar or operate trains. It designs and runs the programs that connect a large project to the people around it: disadvantaged and small businesses, local workers, public agencies, contractors and residents. It handles certified-business participation, local and targeted hiring, labor and Project Labor Agreement compliance, community relations, public outreach, events and the cloud systems used to keep the evidence in one place.
Put more plainly, MTI makes public promises operational. The distinction matters. “Create local opportunity” fits neatly on a podium sign. In practice it becomes a chain of work packages, certification rules, phone calls, workshops, language access, payroll records, bid deadlines and reports. Each link can break independently.
The work beneath the work
Hernandez came to this niche with an aerospace engineering degree from UCLA and, later, construction-management training. That combination offers a clue to MTI's character. Community engagement is usually described with soft nouns - trust, inclusion, relationships. MTI treats those things as a system-design problem without pretending they are merely technical.
Its roster reinforces the point. The public team page is divided into community relations, jobs and workforce development, West Coast and East Coast small-business teams, systems administration, marketing, finance and human resources. This is not a conventional public-relations agency with a compliance specialist attached. Nor is it a software vendor selling a standard dashboard. It sits between those categories.
“We believe in harnessing the strengths of diversity and technology to deliver better business results.”Modern Times, Inc., statement of approach
A $2.1 billion matchmaking exercise
The cleanest view of MTI's method comes from San Diego's Mid-Coast Corridor Transit Project, a $2.1 billion extension completed in 2021. Mid-Coast Transit Constructors - a joint venture led by Stacy and Witbeck with Herzog and Skanska - hired MTI to oversee its disadvantaged-business and small-business programs.
The team began before construction by breaking down the scope and identifying subcontracting opportunities. Then it cross-referenced those packages with certified firms in the region. The gap between the work available and the businesses ready to perform it became the plan. Outreach events explained schedules and bids; training courses covered the administrative and operating skills firms would need both on Mid-Coast and after it.
The sequence sounds obvious only after someone has written it down. Many outreach programs start with the event: reserve a room, make a flyer, count attendance. Mid-Coast started with the work. That changed the question from “How many companies came?” to “Did the companies that could perform this package know about it, and what prevented them from competing?”
One result can be seen in PCA Trucking. The company entered the project as a subcontractor, became DBE-certified, attended outreach events and eventually won a $500,000 first-tier contract. MTI's account says PCA grew from two employees to four full-time employees plus a part-timer and expanded its equipment. It is one firm, not a controlled experiment. But it shows what “participation” looks like when the noun acquires trucks, payroll and another chance to bid.
From bridges to ballots of opinion
MTI's published portfolio moves across an odd assortment of American landmarks: the LAX Automated People Mover, the Sixth Street Viaduct, Maryland's Purple Line, the Green Line Extension near Boston, the Tappan Zee Bridge, Kansas City's streetcar extension, Buffalo's new stadium, a Brooklyn jail facility and Los Angeles medical-center projects. The objects differ. The coordination problem repeats.
In 2026, that same competence showed up in a different kind of assignment. Orange County Transportation Authority sought a consultant to reach communities often missed by traditional engagement and to collect data-informed input for long-range transportation planning. Thirteen firms proposed. Two were interviewed. MTI ranked first with a score of 90.
Why OCTA ranked MTI first
Evaluators cited transportation experience, Spanish-language outreach, a multilingual subcontractor team, survey capability, positive references, a competitive weighted hourly rate and a detailed first-60-days plan. Staff recommended an $884,680 agreement for an initial two-year term, with one two-year option.
That amount is also the most honest answer to “What does MTI cost?” There is no menu. This is scoped, procured professional work. A multi-year regional engagement program costs hundreds of thousands of dollars; a different compliance assignment will have different staffing, geography and reporting demands. The business model is consulting and program management, sometimes hired directly by an agency and sometimes embedded in a prime contractor or joint venture.
The narrow place in a broad market
The usual alternatives
Agencies can run programs in-house. Prime contractors can assemble compliance and communications teams. Public-involvement firms can handle meetings and media. Software vendors can track forms and metrics.
MTI's wager
The work is more coherent when certified-business programs, workforce compliance, community relations and the data system live close enough to share context.
That integrated position is the company's difference, and also its constraint. A dashboard cannot manufacture trust. An outreach team cannot fix a bid package that is too large for the available small-business market. Training cannot rescue a schedule with no room for new entrants. The method works best when MTI enters early, owners are willing to divide opportunity into realistic scopes, prime contractors share usable information, and somebody has authority to act on what the community program learns.
What can another project copy? Start with procurement, not promotion. Inventory the work. Inventory the market. Identify the mismatch. Train for that mismatch. Put the deadlines and evidence in a system everyone can use. Then keep talking after the kickoff meeting. None of this is theatrical. That is precisely why it travels.
Modern Times is itself a certified disadvantaged business helping larger projects make room for other disadvantaged and small businesses. There is a pleasing recursion in that. The firm's credibility does not come only from explaining access; it has had to navigate the same institutional maze.
The finished bridge will always be easier to photograph. Yet the more interesting structure may be the one beneath it: a temporary network of firms, workers, agencies and neighborhoods, held together long enough to turn a public commitment into a result. MTI's job is to make sure that structure does not disappear simply because no one thought to draw it.