Before the developers go to work, it’s the engineering firms that make it happen.

Ashley & Vance Engineering is celebrating its 20th year of working on high-profile projects throughout Santa Barbara County.

The firm has offices in eight cities, including Santa Barbara, and performed the civil engineering for l the middle-income housing project at the corner of Castillo and Carrillo, Heritage Ridge in Goleta, the Carrillo Ballpark renovation, and several others throughout the county.

The work of the company has taken on a higher profile role in Santa Barbara in recent years as city planners aim to develop housing on existing sites, which requires civil engineering work often in small spaces.

“About land, God’s not making any more of it, so people are really trying to recycle what we have, and not build into, especially coastal California, the natural areas, keeping it nice and pristine,” said Jason Gotsis, principal engineer at the firm.

The firm focuses on site clearing, with an emphasis on stormwater management, which is a major concentration of local engineering firms. While structural engineering refers to the building, and typically everything after the architectural plans, civil engineers prepare the site, including drainage, utilities, water and sewer, storm drain and domestic water mains.

They helped with rebuilding in Montecito after the 2018 debris flow.

For projects near the ocean, they contend with liquefaction and sand.

In Santa Barbara, many of the new housing projects are on existing lots, and civil engineering firms must ensure that the stormwater remains on the site or is filtered safely. The company worked on the downtown Drift Hotel, which is a historic building, and the former home of the church of Scientology.

“It’s literally zero lot line, so from a civil engineering standpoint we had to hold all the water under the building,” Principal engineer Paul Belmont said. “All of the downtown sites have complexities.”

The team also recently worked on Linden Square in Carpinteria and the Palms Restaurant in Carpinteria.

“We always look at how does this impact our neighbors below,” Gotsis said. “We want to make sure whatever we do doesn’t have an adverse effect downhill.”

The firm also contracts directly with the city of Guadalupe for its electric vehicle charging station.

Ashley & Vance was founded by two Cal Poly San Luis Obispo graduates, Charles Ashley and Truitt Vance, 20 years ago. The Santa Barbara office opened in 2012. It has about 15 employees at the local office and 130 across all firms.

Belmont said the success of the firm the past 20 years has centered on “putting people over profit.”

“It’s just been organic growth,” Belmont said. “The founding partners always had the attitude of do what you love with the people you like, and that’s internally and externally.”

The first office was in Atascadero, then San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara was the third.

Ashley & Vance began with three employees as a structural engineering company.

Belmont graduated from Cal Poly in 2005 and started the Santa Barbara office.

Gotsis started in 2013. He met Vance first.

“Truitt definitely had an energy about him,” Gotsis said.

He met with Ashley next and determined there was something different about the two of them.

“I said these guys have something different,” Gotsis said. “I had worked at two other firms in Santa Barbara. And these guys got me interested, and I have been here 12 years. It’s different here than other companies I have been at.”

Ashley & Vance also has had a hand recently in the housing project on North La Cumbre owned by the Santa Barbara Housing Authority, the renovation of the Louise Lowery Davis Center, the Girsh Park concession stands, and a while back the Marc apartment building on State Street.

Chad Pruett graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. It’s the only firm he has worked at. He began in 2008, and then moved to the Santa Barbara office in 2015.

“I was pretty bright-eyed and bushy-tailed coming out of school that it was always a special place to be, and that has been affirmed and reaffirmed year after year,” Pruett said.

Pruett said the growth of the firm has centered on finding people mostly right out of college, with no acquisitions.

“Allowing someone to move to Santa Barbara when they are young and open an office is kind of a unique thing in this industry,” Pruett said. “It sort of explains the ethos of this company.”