02/14/2024

John Olivieri

Executive Director

With over 30 years of experience working in the heavy construction and transportation field, John’s career has taken him to many places around the globe.  He attributes his success to the development of a good work ethic while working as a boy at a local dairy farm bailing hay, mucking out livestock stalls and carrying heavy containers of milk and cream.

As a young man in high school he spent his summers working for a rural, township road crew maintaining and repairing their tertiary road system.  This gave him the opportunity to operate everything from tractors for mowing, chainsaws for cutting trees and brush, to heavy compacting rollers for asphalt repair, and dump trucks to haul gravel.  However, as a young man with a strong back, he was most often shoveling soil, aggregate and hot asphalt. 

All these things combined to inspire him to pursue a degree in civil engineering.  This field seemed to offer the perfect combination of being outdoors most of the time, which he thoroughly enjoyed, while working on heavy transportation projects.

John first began his professional career working at the Richland County Engineering Office.  He was responsible for roadway safety systems and traffic control devices.  He also performed hydraulic calculations for various watershed areas ensuring proper sizing and design for bridge and culvert replacement projects.

Next, he moved to the state capital, Columbus, where he worked as a construction inspector for the Franklin County Engineer.  (Columbus is the county seat of Franklin County and the largest metro area in Ohio).  Typically, he was assigned to road construction projects.  These usually required the removal of all existing pavement, base and even sometimes sub grade materials.  Frequently, unsuitable sub grade materials had to be either replaced with more suitable material or somehow treated or manipulated, using some type of stabilization process, to bring them up to an acceptable strength.  Ultimately this led to him gaining valuable knowledge and insight into assessing whether bases and sub grade materials were stable and strong enough to carry heavy traffic loads.

John subsequently moved on to an association representing all 88 county engineers in the state of Ohio.  He ran a system that allotted funding for the construction of roads, bridges and safety devices for local government agencies.  He was involved in the successful completion of hundreds of projects funded by two separate sources worth more than $50 million annually.

While happy to learn the internal machinations of public funding for large infrastructure projects, he decided to return to his first love and take on projects more likely to include outdoor field work.  Accordingly, he became heavily involved in on-site installation and construction of various precast concrete bridge, culvert and tunnel projects across Ohio. 

In 2004, he created his own consulting-based corporation, Rocca Industries Incorporated.  Simultaneously, he trademarked a new project inspection and project management division called Critical Path Solutions.  Since then, John has experienced many exciting new endeavors, places and interesting people!

One such undertaking was the creation, from the ground up, of a federally certified construction materials testing laboratory. The lab was responsible for determining the compressive strength of concrete, asphalt and soils used in roadway projects.  He also assembled a team of field inspectors used to ensure adherence to construction and design standards, best practices and methodologies.  Parts of this team were also specially licensed and trained to safely and accurately conduct nuclear density field testing for in-situ compaction testing of soils and sub soil surfaces for roadway projects.

John is an effective communicator and strives to foster an atmosphere of seamless coordination with engineers, government officials, contractors and even nontechnical project related stakeholders.  Because of this, several times over the last 15 years, he has acted as a corporate liaison between manufacturers and new customers in an effort to help them develop and introduce new technologies and products and bring them to market.  This includes the development of unexploited market niches for various new devices, systems and even disruptive technologies, all intended for use within the public transportation infrastructure sphere.  (Much to John’s personal delight, on more than one occasion, these opportunities led him inside the famous laboratories of the NASA-Jet Propulsion Laboratories in California!)  Of course, products used for public transportation projects often require prior approval and certification for use on government owned projects.  Accordingly, John has gained valuable knowledge about this very involved and detailed process that has become an integral part of the transportation related industry in the United States.

John earned a Bachelor of Science Degree in Civil Engineering from The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio and a technical certification – “Concrete Professional” from Rhodes State College in Lima, Ohio.  He is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the Ohio Farm Bureau.  He was born and raised in Mansfield, Ohio and still resides in the Columbus metro area with his wife of 31 years, Joan.