Mount Pleasant Town Hall Magazine

31 www.MountPleasantMagazine.com | www.ILoveMountPleasant.com | www.MPTownHall.com MOUNT PLEASANT Town Hall McKnight since January 2004, when he graduated from Georgia Southern University with a degree in Building Construction and Contracting. The learning process got underway immediately. “McKnight starts people in the field, on the front lines,” he explained. “The real education begins on the job.” For Blumenthal, that education got underway at Fort Benning, where his job was to help build the passenger processing facility and do some work on the chapel. From there, he returned to Statesboro, home of Georgia Southern, where McKnight was renovating the library, adding 104,000 square feet of space and refurbishing four floors of the building. The project had been bid by Blumenthal’s brother, Bobby, who worked for McKnight Construction at the time, and Brooks Blumenthal eventually served as project superintendent. The library was originally built by McKnight Construction in 1972. Blumenthal, a native of Augusta, where McKnight has its headquarters, pointed out that as one of three full-time project managers, he is responsible for bidding all his jobs. Unlike many construction companies, McKnight, a family-owned company that operates like a family, doesn’t have full-time estimators. “Our Estimating Department is comprised of our project managers. We all wear many hats, from estimating to project management, which makes our company unique,” he stated. While Mount Pleasant’s Town Hall was under construction, Blumenthal was managing several projects, including a middle school and an elementary school in Atlanta; renovating Coastal Carolina University’s Brooks Stadium in Conway, South Carolina; and Rollings Middle School of the Arts in Dorchester County. He had recently put the finishing touches on three other schools in the Summerville area: Sand Hill Elementary, Alston-Bailey Elementary and Alston Middle. Blumenthal pointed out that many of the subcontractors who helped build Mount Pleasant’s Town Hall are local, based either in Mount Pleasant, Charleston or other nearby locations. He added that being from out of town can be an advantage for a general contractor. For The windows at the front of Town Hall open into the main courtroom. Photo by Brian Sherman.