PACO Group

PACO Group is a construction and program management firm established in 1989, working from Wall Street Plaza at 88 Pine Street in Manhattan with a second office in Miami. The firm concentrates on public infrastructure: aviation, bridges, highways, ports, rail, tunnels and water. It runs construction management on NJ TRANSIT’s $190 million Newark Penn Station rehabilitation, a phased overhaul of a 1935 McKim, Mead & White terminal that stays open throughout. PACO’s other work includes the Amtrak Sawtooth Bridge replacement under the Gateway Program, MTA’s East Side Access and Second Avenue Subway, and the AirTrain Newark replacement for the Port Authority. The firm publishes no headcount.

Right-of-way is the part of PACO’s offering that gets least attention and probably deserves the most, because it is where public infrastructure projects usually stall. The firm’s ROW practice covers records and title research, easement research, metes and bounds description research, line list development and database management, stakeholder engagement, due diligence, the acquisition itself, and engineering support once construction begins. It applies to roads and highways, bridges and tunnels, railroads, general infrastructure and public utility work. A schedule slips far more often over a parcel nobody researched than over a pour that went badly.

The rest of the service list reads as a full owner’s-representative package: program and construction management, project management and controls, project risk management, configuration management, automated submittal and document management workflows, asset management, and multi-discipline construction inspection. On inspection, PACO describes staff who measure, examine and validate work against contract requirements, reviewing both quality and conformance to safety requirements rather than signing off on completion alone.

The firm is candid that change is the norm rather than the exception, noting that even a well-developed set of design plans and detailed specifications is no guarantee a project avoids numerous changes. Its project controls pitch leans on data analytics and visualisation tools that let managers read large volumes of project data in something close to real time.

Frank Otero founded PACO in 1989 and is still President and CEO, which gives the firm an unusually long single-leadership run for its size. He is a former Business Member Board Director of the American Public Transportation Association, where he created the Business Members Minority Business Committee, served a six-year term on the board of the National Transit Cooperative Research Board, and is a Fellow at Rutgers University.

The project list is heavily transit and aviation: the Amtrak Sawtooth Bridge replacement under the Gateway Program, NJ Transit’s Portal North Bridge, MTA New York City Transit’s Second Avenue Subway, MTA-LIRR East Side Access, PM support for Dulles Corridor Metrorail Phase 2 for MWAA, and construction management on the AirTrain replacement at Newark for the Port Authority.

The office is at 88 Pine Street, Suite 1802, New York, NY 10005.