Ames Construction

Ames Construction is a heavy civil and industrial general contractor founded in Minnesota in 1962 by Dick Ames as Richard J. Ames Excavating. The firm self-performs the majority of its work, including earthwork, structural concrete, paving, aggregate processing and utilities, and delivers projects through design-build, progressive design-build and CMGC arrangements as well as hard bid. It works in transportation, mining, railroad, water resources, federal and data center markets, with roughly 3,500 employees across nine locations in seven states and a Burnsville, Minnesota headquarters. Ames became employee-owned through an ESOP in 2024. On the FM Area Diversion in Fargo, North Dakota, Ames is building the water control structures for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, including the Red River Structure.

Ames Construction traces its start to 1962, when Dick Ames bought a used Cat D8 and graded two miles of township road in Minnesota. The corporate office is still in Burnsville, at 2500 County Road 42 W, and the firm now works as a heavy civil and industrial general contractor across the United States.

Seven markets carry the work: transportation, industrial, mining, railroad, water resources, CCR and environmental, and federal contracting handled through the Ames Federal Contracting Group office in Salt Lake City. Project types run from highways, bridges and grade separations to dams, levees, canals, reservoirs, leach pads, tailings storage facilities, landfills, ports and data center sites.

Self-perform capacity is how Ames keeps a grip on schedule and cost. In-house crews handle aggregate processing, civil earthwork, concrete paving, structural concrete, mechanical scopes and underground utilities, supported by the company’s own equipment fleet and craft teams. Delivery happens through Design-Build, Progressive Design-Build, CMGC, CMAR and Early Contractor Involvement, with construction staff involved in preconstruction from the start rather than picking up a finished design at bid time.

Regional offices place teams near the work. Burnsville covers the Central region, Charlotte the Eastern, Denver the Mountain region, Corona in California the Pacific, Scottsdale the Southwest, and West Valley City in Utah along with Carlin and Reno in Nevada the Western region.

The project record includes Denver International Airport, where roughly 300 Ames employees worked around the clock from late 1989 to 1994; I-15 CORE in Utah County, the company’s first billion-dollar design-build highway contract; the RTD Eagle P3 commuter rail program in Colorado; Loop 202 South Mountain Freeway, the largest highway project in Arizona history; five major crossings of the St. Croix and Mississippi Rivers; and 18 million cubic yards of earthwork at the Greensboro-Randolph Megasite in North Carolina for an electric vehicle battery plant.

Safety is run by an integrated team of health and safety professionals, with mandatory SAFEStart training for new hires, ongoing supervisor training, project-specific safety plans and pre-shift meetings. The company adopted the tagline Working in Harmony with Nature in the early 1970s, a nod to the soil conservation jobs that got it going. Ames has since moved from family ownership to an employee stock ownership plan.