FTN Associates

FTN Associates received its first prime contract in 1982 to perform a waste-load allocation study around Lake Catherine for the city of Hot Springs.

Now in its 25th year, the water resource and environmental consulting firm is about to wrap up a five-year, $10 million contract with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to remap flood plains in Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico.

President Dennis Ford said the company has gotten this far with the help of the company’s 65 outstanding employees bringing together expertise in botany, chemistry, ecology, hydrology and geology as well as environmental and civil engineering.

Ford founded FTN in 1981 with Kent Thornton and Joseph Norton, the other two letters, in Vicksburg, Miss. In 1983, FTN moved to Little Rock, where opportunity awaited.

“There wasn’t anybody in the state who did the type of work that we did at that time, and there really still isn’t today,” Ford said. In Little Rock, FTN could also be near the offices of one of its biggest clients, the Army Corp of Engineers, and centrally located among other Corp offices.

Now FTN has branch offices in Fayetteville, Baton Rouge, La., and Jackson, Miss., serving about 110 clients a year.

Historically, most of the company’s work has been outside Arkansas, where it competes for jobs against firms that employ thousands of people. But that changed last year as more opportunities opened up, for example, with the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality, which contracted FTN to turn old, contaminated industrial sites into land viable for development.

The company has also started expanding its solid waste management segment, picking up more work designing landfills and methane gas collection systems for landfills.

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