LYNNWOOD — Sparling electrical engineering and architectural lighting design firm is being acquired through a merger with Stantec, an Edmonton, Canada,-based company.
Sparling, and its lighting design division Candela, has 130 employees in three offices in Lynnwood, Portland, Oregon, and San Diego. Stantec is a much larger firm with 15,000 employees in 250 offices worldwide.
“They’ve admired our firm for a long time,” said Eric Overton, Sparling’s CEO. “I know it sounds ridiculous being 15,000 compared to 130, but they’ve liked a lot of the things that we’ve done.”
Sparling is a leading electrical engineering firm with expertise in niche services including acoustics, lighting and wireless engineering, said Stanis Smith, Stantec’s executive vice president, buildings. Sparling also has a presence and relationships on the West Coast and in the Pacific Northwest that appealed to Stantec, an architecture and engineering firm.
“They’re not just well respected in the local community, they’re well-respected in the design community,” Smith said.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Sparling is a privately held company with three primary owners and 25 shareholders. The deal is scheduled to close on Feb. 28 with Sparling becoming part of Stantec on March 1.
Overton will remain with Stantec as a vice president. He said that the employees in his offices will keep their jobs.
“That was very important to me,” Overton said. “The people in this firm — we just have very great people. It was important to me that we kept them.”
Smith said that every effort will be made to keep Sparling’s employees, saying that they’re in the “people business” and they hope to allow them to flourish.
Sparling has worked on large, complex projects on the West Coast including working with Amazon.com’s Seattle South Union campus, Lincoln Square in Bellevue and the University of Oregon’s Hatfield-Dowlin Complex. By joining Stantec, Sparling employees will be able to compete for projects nationally, Overton said.
“If we want to stay competitive and hire great people and retain people, we need to have that kind of work,” Overton said.
Sparling started 68 years ago in Seattle focused on electrical engineering in the marine industry. In recent years, Sparling has focused its efforts on engineering in buildings. The company moved to Lynnwood in 2001.
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