Bill Gulick

During his career at the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, Mr. Gulick has left the imprint of his knowledge and expertise in a number of areas. Many of the practices and policies he has advocated for have produced transformational changes that revolutionized how the Cabinet’s engineers and staff conduct day-to-day business. In the mid-1990s, Mr. Gulick’s forward thinking led him to push for entirely computerizing highway design, plan creation, and field surveying. He oversaw the Cabinet’s implementation of computer-aided design, which remains integral to the Cabinet’s everyday work, and is a standard throughout the transportation engineering industry. While in Highway Design, Mr. Gulick presided over the efforts of the Standard Drawings Section. As part of this, he taught numerous Roadside Design classes to hundreds of professionals hailing from all disciplines, which sharpened the Cabinet’s focus on the importance of roadside safety.Beginning in 1998, Mr. Gulick spearheaded the Cabinet’s efforts toimplement Context Sensitive Design (CSD), which preserves and enhancesnatural and built environments along roads while also safeguarding theeconomic assets and social capital of the neighborhoods they pass through. He served as Project Manager on the Paris Pike project, the first to adopt Context Sensitive Design in Kentucky. Building on this success, Mr. Gulick developed training courses on CSD required of all highway design engineers at the Cabinet and also presented these courses to FHWA staff, consultants, and other DOT personnel from other states. Applying CSD principles has transformed how the Cabinet delivers projects. CSD leverages a Publicly Owned Project framework, which involves Cabinet officials listening to public feedback and collaborating with other public agencies during early stages of the design process to ensure projects are a good fit for the environments they are built in.

Mr. Gulick has a passion for project management, and has been a champion of offering the Cabinet’s project managers robust training. He coordinated development of the Preconstruction Project Managers Academy in 2002, and was a vocal and enthusiastic proponent of revamping this training through the Project Managers Boot Camp, a multi-day course that has been conducted twice in 2015. Mr. Gulick authored several of the training modules used in the Boot Camp and it has received universal acclaim from participants and senior Cabinet officials. As Steve Waddle said, “Mr. Gulick has either directly or indirectly helped train nearly all Cabinet and Industry leaders presently working in project development how to do their job”. Along with this, Mr. Gulick was instrumental in leading the charge for Practical Solutions. Kentucky has since been recognized as a national leader on this front. From 2009 to 2014 Mr. Gulick served as the Assistant Director of Highway Design until being elevated to the Director of Highway Design, where he continues his leadership today and is leading an ambitious rewrite of Kentucky’s Highway Design Manual. Mr. Gulick’s credentials and contributions to improving the Commonwealth’s transportation networks are unimpeachable. Mr. Gulick was one of the founders of the ACEC/FHWA/KYTC Annual Partnering Conference, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2015.This conference facilitates collaboration among the Cabinet’s engineers, transportation consultants, and researchers to ensure Kentucky remains a national leader in transportation. The state’s transportation landscape has been positively and permanently changed through Mr. Gulick’s immense contributions to the Transportation Industry in Kentucky and across the Country. His expertise, leadership, and professional intuition are unmatched. Mr. Gulick’s impact on project development both within the state and at the national level cannot be overstated. He has never been afraid to push other professionals to think beyond the here and the now. On occasion that has put him at odds with his supervisor, but he has never been one to back down. Much to his detriment at times, Mr. Gulick has always stood steadfast in his beliefs when he is convinced that he is correct. I have asked Mr. Gulick on occasion how many times he has been fired and hired by KYTC, and he always says he has been hired one more time than he has been fired. Despite the fact that he has challenged individuals who many would not dare, he has been able to always recover in a positive manner and make a strong impact on transportation at many different levels.