Woodard & Curran

The Story

A project manager in Portland, Maine pulls up a SCADA dashboard at 7 a.m. and checks the chlorine dosing rates at a municipal treatment plant 200 miles away. The plant is running fine. The water is clean. The town's 40,000 residents have no idea this is happening, which is precisely the point.

That is Woodard & Curran at work - invisible when things go right, indispensable when they don't. For more than four decades, this employee-owned engineering and environmental consulting firm has been operating at the intersection of clean water, contaminated land, and the regulatory frameworks trying to govern both. They are not flashy. They do not run Super Bowl ads. What they do is keep water safe.

The Problem Nobody Wants to Think About

Context

America's water infrastructure is quietly failing. Pipes laid in the 1950s are finally corroding. Agricultural runoff carries new classes of chemicals that didn't exist when the treatment plants were designed. PFAS - the "forever chemicals" used in everything from cookware to firefighting foam - have contaminated drinking water supplies in hundreds of communities. And the regulatory framework requiring utilities to address all of this was written for problems that scientists are still diagnosing.

The political will to fix infrastructure exists in waves. The funding programs are real but complicated - federal grants, state revolving funds, IIJA allocations, EPA Superfund dollars. The engineering talent to actually execute is finite, distributed unevenly, and expensive to maintain in-house for a town of 15,000 people.

This is the gap that Woodard & Curran occupies. Not the gap between "we have money" and "we spent it well." The gap between "we have a problem" and "we understand what the problem actually is."

Two Engineers, One Law, and a Very Long Bet

Origins

Frank Woodard and Al Curran met at the University of Maine. Both were licensed professional engineers. Both understood that the Clean Water Act of 1972 - brand new at the time - had just created an enormous and underserved market: municipalities that were suddenly legally required to treat their wastewater but had no idea how to do it.

In 1979, they founded Woodard & Curran in Maine and started helping those municipalities figure it out. The bet wasn't on a specific technology or a particular chemical process. The bet was on complexity - that water and environmental problems would keep getting harder, that the regulatory environment would keep getting more demanding, and that clients would consistently need partners who could both design a solution and operate it for the next twenty years.

That bet has held. The company that started helping Maine municipalities navigate early Clean Water Act compliance is now treating billions of gallons of water annually for clients across 14 states, cleaning up Superfund sites left by industrial operations that predate modern environmental law, and building the digital SCADA systems that let a single operator monitor infrastructure spread across a region.

Frank Woodard still has a namesake award at the company. Al Curran helped build the largest engineering firm Maine has ever produced.

What They Actually Do

Services

Woodard & Curran describes itself as an integrated firm, which in practice means they don't hand off. When they design a water treatment plant, they can also build it under a design-build contract, commission the SCADA control systems, and then operate the facility under a long-term management contract. That continuity matters more than it sounds - most of the problems with infrastructure arise at handoff points between firms.

The Evidence File

Proof Points

The University of New Hampshire needed a new water treatment plant. Woodard & Curran designed and built it under a design-build contract with partner Waterline Industries - treating up to 2 million gallons per day for Durham and the UNH campus. The ACEC of Massachusetts gave them a Bronze Award for Engineering Excellence. That is a narrow window into a very deep project portfolio.

Eastern Municipal Water District in California hired them. With Woodard & Curran's help navigating federal and state funding programs, the district secured over $230 million in grants and low-interest loans for infrastructure investment. That number is not a typo. Knowing where the money is and how to apply for it is its own form of expertise.

At a New England Superfund site, Woodard & Curran implemented remote telemetry systems that cut operational costs by $50,000 per year per client. The cleanup work at the Beede Waste Oil Superfund Site in Plaistow, New Hampshire earned them the National Ground Water Association's Outstanding Groundwater Remediation Project Award in 2021. These are the kinds of projects that take ten years and get noticed by approximately no one outside the environmental engineering world - which is fine.

How Employee Ownership Shapes Everything

Culture & Structure

Woodard & Curran is 100% employee-owned. This is not a marketing claim - it shapes how the firm operates in ways that are hard to replicate in a publicly traded company or a private equity rollup. Employee-owners have a financial stake in long-term client relationships, not in this quarter's billing cycle. When you own the company, you're less inclined to recommend a solution that requires you to come back next year.

In 2025, the firm went further - opening share ownership to all employees after just one year of service, regardless of title or seniority. Previously, share-buying required a certain level or title. The change was deliberate: the company's theory is that ownership culture has to include everyone, or it's just a benefit for senior staff with a different name.

The Woodard & Curran Foundation, established in 2010 as a separate 501(c)(3), has committed over $1.8 million in grants to community organizations. In 2024 alone, the foundation approved $240,000 in grants; employees contributed $123,000 of their own money, which the company matched with $130,000. The Frank Woodard Leadership Innovation Award encourages employees to pursue projects that matter to them personally. Annual hockey tournaments - this is Maine, after all - are a genuine part of the culture, not a slide in the all-hands deck.

Why It Matters Tomorrow

Looking Forward

The EPA's new PFAS regulations will require thousands of utilities to test for and remediate contamination they didn't know was there. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act has made tens of billions of dollars available for water infrastructure - but only to communities that can write a credible application and execute a credible project. Sea level rise is forcing coastal municipalities to rethink stormwater systems that were designed for a different climate. Aging infrastructure is finally being replaced after decades of deferred maintenance.

All of this is work that Woodard & Curran is built for. The firm has spent 45 years building the exact combination of science, engineering, regulatory expertise, and operational capacity that these problems require. They're not pivoting to water. They've always been water.

Back to that project manager in Portland, checking the chlorine dosing at 7 a.m. The dashboard is green. The plant is running fine. Forty thousand people will drink clean water today and not think about it at all - which is exactly how it should work, and exactly how hard it is to make that happen. Woodard & Curran is in the business of making it look easy.

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