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2025 WTS-LA Award Winner Spotlight: Honorable Ray LaHood Award Recipient Ted Allen, PE, City Engineer (Retired) at City of Los Angeles Bureau of Engineering 

Throughout his 31-year career with the City of Los Angeles Bureau of Engineering, Ted Allen, PE, was a champion for new technologies while building a robust and successful employee-first culture at the Bureau of Engineering—a culture that significantly supports the training and development of the bureau’s employees, especially women and minorities.

Ted, when appointed City Engineer in 2022, took on the challenge of developing an employee-first culture at the Bureau of Engineering to help address loss of institutional knowledge due to COVID-related staff attrition. This commitment to employee development led him to invest significant resources into a number of new initiatives, including a technical training series, increased employee participation in professional organizations and boards, a months-long training for managers to improve their supervision, interviewing and performance evaluation skills, and other new programs and initiatives.

Allen also led the expansion of the agency’s mentorship program, the summer internship program for college students, and the agency’s rotation program for new employees, which places them for a year in three different areas of project delivery in the agency. As part of Allen’s commitment to expanding participation and connections across the industry, he also took a leadership role on industry advisory boards for UCLA Civil and Environmental Engineering and Cal State Los Angeles Computer Science, and became a Director at Large for WTS-LA. For more than 20 years, as part of the American Public Works Association, he was a key leader in their capital project benchmarking group, meeting quarterly with other leaders from large California cities, and in recent years with large, nationwide cities and counties.