England-Thims & Miller (ETM)

England-Thims & Miller, known as ETM, is a privately owned civil engineering and development consulting firm founded in Jacksonville in 1977 by three partners with four employees. Its headquarters is on Old St. Augustine Road on the city’s south side, with additional Florida offices in Gainesville and Tallahassee. The firm started in land development, planning and engineering and now also handles traffic and transportation, water and utilities, surveying and mapping, geospatial work, entitlements and construction engineering and inspection. Master-planned communities, industrial sites, healthcare campuses and public infrastructure make up much of the portfolio. ETM was the civil engineer for Southeast Toyota Distributors’ $145 million vehicle processing center on 88 acres at JAXPORT’s Blount Island Marine Terminal, an ENR Southeast Award of Merit winner.

Eight Florida offices now carry the work, and the way they are organized says something about how ETM operates. Besides the Old St. Augustine Road headquarters there is a second Jacksonville office on Hendricks Avenue, in the downtown core rather than out south. Gainesville is branded the ETM Accelerator. DeLand and Kissimmee are designated field offices rather than full offices, which is the arrangement a firm uses when inspection staff need to be near long-running construction rather than near a client.

That inspection work has its own discipline heading, construction engineering and inspection, and sits alongside site design, surveying and mapping, traffic and transportation, water and utilities, geospatial technologies, placemaking, and development consulting and entitlements. Subsurface utility engineering is listed among the disciplines too, which is the service that keeps an excavator away from an unmapped line.

Development consulting splits by market rather than by task: healthcare, industrial, multifamily, office, mixed-use, retail, and sports and hospitality, with separate offerings around land portfolios, master planned and residential communities, and infill development.

Recent and named projects include the Fidelity National Information Services global headquarters, One Tower Court, Met Park Marina and RISE Doro in downtown Jacksonville, the One More Child Compassion Center, and Riberia Street.

One small practical detail for anyone commissioning a boundary or topographic survey: the Jacksonville headquarters publishes a dedicated survey number, (904) 642-8550, separate from the main corporate line on (904) 642-8990.