Kraemer North America

Kraemer North America is a heavy civil contractor founded in 1911 and headquartered in Plain, Wisconsin, with regional offices in Eau Claire, Burnsville, Castle Rock and Tukwila. The firm builds bridges, highways and transit infrastructure across the upper Midwest and Mountain West, and works regularly under alternative delivery including design-build and CM/GC. Kraemer is delivering the $280.4 million East Colfax Avenue Bus Rapid Transit project in Denver and Aurora under a CM/GC contract, rebuilding roughly ten miles of Colorado’s busiest bus corridor with center-running dedicated lanes while the street stays open to traffic. The company’s project history is weighted toward complex bridge work and staged reconstruction on active corridors.

Beyond the highway and transit work Kraemer is best known for, the company runs two other lines of business that shape what it can take on.

Marine construction is one. Kraemer crews have built on the Mississippi, Missouri and Illinois Rivers, on tributaries feeding Lake Michigan and Lake Superior, and across inland lakes and rivers throughout the region. That portfolio covers dam construction and rehabilitation, air bladder dam construction and maintenance, flood control, scour abatement, shore stabilization, pump station construction and riprap installation. Because the same organization also owns structural erection, foundation and shoring capability, marine jobs are resourced in-house rather than brokered out.

Rail is the other. Kraemer has worked in rail construction for more than half a century and operates a National Railroad Group from a regional office at 4228 Southtowne Drive in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The group supports freight, commuter and light rail owners with comprehensive planning and switch-out work, engineering input, skilled personnel and specialized equipment.

The office network behind all of this: corporate headquarters at 1 Plainview Road in Plain, Wisconsin, covering the Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa area; an Upper Midwest office in Burnsville, Minnesota; a Mountain West office in Castle Rock, Colorado; and a Pacific West office in Tukwila, Washington.

On credentials, Kraemer is an AISC certified and endorsed contractor for steel and bridge erection, which matters on any job where the steel superstructure drives the schedule. Quality is run as a project-specific program rather than one corporate checklist, with frequent inspections by Kraemer management, craft and quality professionals during construction instead of reactive checking afterward. The company describes this as no re-work management: meeting the schedule by completing the work correctly the first time.

The history explains some of the range. Edward Kraemer started the business in 1911 as a 21-year-old carpenter with six employees, building houses, barns, cheese factories, schools and churches around the Village of Plain. Road and bridge work followed Sauk County’s road-building push in the early 1920s, with the Maxwell and Fargan bridges recorded in 1924 and a first highway contract on Highway 60 in August 1927. Depression-era WPA contracts, a patent for a self-propelled double-jawed crusher, wartime ammunition plant and airport runway work, and at one point ownership of roughly 70 quarries all sit in the company record before building construction was dropped in the late 1950s to concentrate on roads and bridges.