Spotlight On: Richard Adams, Principal, Kimley-Horn

Key points:

• • Kimley-Horn is helping shape Raleigh’s future through major transit, airport, and infrastructure projects.
• • The firm sees strong growth in energy, EV infrastructure, and housing development across the region.
• • Richard Adams says communication and collaboration are essential as Raleigh manages rapid growth and change.

May 2026 — Invest: spoke with Richard Adams, principal at Kimley-Horn, about the firm’s role in infrastructure and mobility projects across the region, and where it sees growth ahead. “It varies tremendously, but there are a lot of things that we’re involved with that are forward-looking,” Adams said.

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What role do you see Kimley-Horn playing in shaping the city’s long-term infrastructure and mobility strategy?

We’re super excited about the growth in this region. As you probably know, we’re a national company, but we were founded right here in Raleigh. We have well over 400 people located in this market. We’re one of the biggest employers in downtown Raleigh.

In terms of infrastructure, we’re excited to be a part of all sorts of infrastructure projects, everything from municipal roadway projects to the largest transit project in the region, the Western Boulevard corridor bus rapid transit project from Raleigh to Cary. The airport is another big one. We’re ramping up our work at the airport in a big way. Especially on the land side, we’re doing a lot of roadway design. John Brantley Boulevard is a big project for us, as well as parking improvements in the terminal area.

Infrastructure is important, and fortunately, we have a lot of infrastructure projects coming, so we’re super excited about being a part of that.

How do you integrate different disciplines effectively on complex projects?

At Kimley-Horn, we’re particularly adept at bringing a lot of different disciplines together to help our clients. For instance, landscape architecture has been a tremendously symbiotic practice to partner with our traditional civil engineering practice, which has probably been our biggest discipline overall since our founding. Landscape architecture and civil engineering have lots of overlapping areas.

Rather than being in different firms that create a lot of confusion and opportunity for miscommunication, bringing all that together for our clients is a great way to provide seamless services. We look at our landscape architects and civil engineers as partners and not competitors. That has worked out well for us and for our clients.

It’s similar in our newer disciplines, like energy (including natural gas, power delivery, renewables, and the like), which is a relatively new area for us but one that is growing tremendously. We have found that area fits well with our ethos of client service. We’re obsessed with client service, but we’re also obsessed with our own employees and providing great opportunities and great rewards for them. By taking that approach to consulting and bringing it into the energy industry, we’ve found great opportunities to bring on new people and help new clients.

There’s tons of growth in energy, tons of demand out there. There’s a huge need out there for great client service and consultants who are nimble and who can react quickly to changing markets, and that’s right in our sweet spot.

How do you ensure that stakeholder input meaningfully influences project outcomes?

That’s a challenge because for any project that has some level of controversy or just community disagreement, you can’t plan and design to make everybody 100% happy. On Hillsborough Street, where we implemented the dramatic changes near the NC State campus, some people wanted to leave four lanes all the way through there because of the perceived need for traffic capacity. Other people would have preferred to shut the road down to traffic entirely.

You need to compromise, communicate, and work with your clients to make sure that people are heard. That’s how we developed the two-lane divided roadway section with roundabouts and lots of pedestrian enhancements.

One of the things we try to do when we have these community engagements is actively listen, repeat back what you hear, document what you hear, and then bring back for the next engagement series: “This is what we heard.” Then (in the Hillsborough Street example), we demonstrate to the community that we can’t maintain capacity for 20,000 vehicles a day and also shut the road down to traffic. We’re dealing with mutually exclusive things, and so we as a community on a project have to reach some level of consensus.

We work with the community to make sure they understand they’ve been heard, and here is how we’re changing our project to respond to these things, but also let them know and demonstrate to them that everybody can’t be 100% satisfied with the outcome because, again, quite often, desires are mutually exclusive. It’s all about communication with the community.

What are some of the biggest regulatory or permitting challenges you face in North Carolina, and how does your team navigate them?

Regulatory challenges are certainly out there, and they’re not going away. One of the biggest challenges is that they do change as communities grow. There’s more desire at the community level to manage growth, and so a lot of new regulations are introduced. Unified Development Ordinances are rewritten, and we’re actually involved in a lot of those rewrites.

One of the keys for us is just being informed. We don’t create policy. Our elected officials do that, and that’s what they should do. But we need to know about policy changes, we need to respond to them, and we need to help our clients understand what the regulations are, what the new regulations are, and how they’re changing. Then we help them understand how their project can navigate it.

One of the keys to doing what we do is having smart people who stay on top of these things. When we learn new information, we share that with our clients, and we share that internally with our employees. We’re good at communicating internally. Within this one county (Wake), we have 12 different municipalities, all of them growing, with 1.2 million people already living here and another 70 moving in every day.

We need to understand all the different regulations in those communities, and then we need to share that information with each other and with our clients. It’s a matter of understanding and reacting accordingly. This also applies to our environmental services practice, where we have to stay on top of the latest state and federal requirements and policies and act as a trusted advisor to help clients navigate the latest processes.

How are you incorporating sustainability and climate resilience into projects in the Raleigh region?

It varies tremendously, but there are a lot of things that we’re involved with that are forward-looking in terms of climate and resilience. We’re one of the largest players in the transit development business in the Raleigh-Durham market. We work for Go Raleigh, Go Triangle, Go Durham, all of the transit agencies around here. We’re working on Western Bus Rapid Transit, which we’re super excited about as a game changer for transit in the Raleigh market. 

We’re also heavily involved in solar and other resilient infrastructure elements. We have a big solar practice based here in Raleigh, and we practice across the country in solar, working on large-scale solar developments and smaller-scale solar developments. There have been ups and downs in solar, but it’s not going away. It is a growth industry for us.

Electric vehicle charging is another one. I personally drive an electric vehicle. We’re working with all sorts of EV charging clients across the country, some of them well-known, others startups that are developing EV infrastructure. The EV sector is another area that’s a part of our growth.

What is on the horizon for Kimley-Horn in Raleigh in terms of new initiatives, projects, or developments?

There are a couple of exciting things. I mentioned transit. I mentioned the airport. We’re really excited about our roadway work and our parking facilities we’re designing out there. We’re also growing in the single-family market. We’ve traditionally not done a lot of site civil engineering for single-family, but that’s now a big growth area for us.

There is tremendous demand for housing at every level. We’re certainly doing plenty of multifamily work, but single-family as well. Our clients have been receptive to that.

We’re also working on some unique developments. There’s a new mixed-use district proposed around our existing arena here, which houses both the Carolina Hurricanes and the NC State men’s basketball team, and tons of concerts and other events. It’s a tremendously busy facility. The owner of the hockey team is going to develop a mixed-use district all the way around the arena. We’re leading both the infrastructure design for that and the site civil engineering for all that development. 

We’ve had tremendous growth. We grew over 20% year over year, from 2024 to 2025. We hired over a thousand college grads last year, and over a thousand interns. These are nationwide numbers. All these great projects and all that tremendous growth are creating great opportunities for our people, which is our main purpose for who we are and what we do.

For 19 years now, we’ve been on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For. Providing a great place for our people to work is our ultimate goal. We do that by growing tremendously and serving the heck out of our clients, and all that creates great opportunities for growth and rewards for our employees.

Want more? Read the Invest: Raleigh-Durham report.