A prominent business in Jefferson held a ribbon-cutting ceremony and an open house Thursday to commemorate their new location on the downtown square.

Bolton and Menk engineering services moved into the former Art and the Fly and John’s Appliance buildings on the west side of the square. Jim Leiding has been with the company for over 30 years and also serves as the city engineer for the city of Jefferson. Leiding stated that after Bolton and Menk took over for MHF Engineering in 2016, they started looking for a new location last March from where the company was located, which was under the overpass bridge on Highway 4.

“We were looking to upgrade and looking for a spot that was a little more visible, a little bit more out into the public, so the people see us and recognize what we’re doing. Just started looking at buildings around the area that were potential options and happen to stumble across this one and it kind of fell into place and worked out that we were able to get this put together and remodeled and get moved in.”    

Leiding noted that the renovations started last October and were completed this past February, which features some nods to the historic nature of the building.

“On the John’s Appliance side, we were able to save the hardwood floors, like (building owner) Jolene (Peters) did on the Art on the Fly side. The John’s side had a tin ceiling and that was in good enough shape that we were able to just seal that and leave it as it was. So, you can actually see it’s got some discoloration from a fire at one point in the building’s history.”

Leiding added that the Jefferson location primarily offers agriculture drainage engineering services, along with municipal engineering, but he is hopeful to increase the civil engineering space as they continue to add more staff. Bolton and Menk employs more than 12,000 people company-wide, across seven states, including six locations in Iowa, including Cedar Rapids, Algona, Ames, Des Moines and Spencer, along with Jefferson.