Tara Bettale

Tara leads our strategic communications team in Denver, a one-stop-shop of services of public engagement strategy development, facilitation/mediation, visual communication and graphic design, and website and social media development. She also serves as the strategic communications lead for our transit practice, using her experience to improve our outreach and engagement efforts on transit projects across North America.

Tara provides leadership and guidance during challenging stakeholder issues, creates innovative public outreach plans to mitigate for social and political crises that could derail a project, and is effective in addressing issues and concerns with local agencies, business owners, and residents alike. She knows public involvement processes and strategies to keep the client’s goals in her frame of reference, yet she also has the objectivity to hear, understand, and address the public’s perspectives without prejudice. She understands the federal, state and local requirements as it relates to outreach, and with her team, finds innovative and alternative ways to satisfy requirements while also customizing outreach plans to the needs and audience of the diverse communities our projects serve. Prior to joining us, Tara served as a public information manager for the Regional Transportation District in Denver, working on the Union Station Redevelopment project and the FasTracks Eagle P3 Commuter Rail project.

She is passionate about ensuring the public’s thumbprint is left on our infrastructure projects, working every day to make communities better and help bring projects to life. Tara finds satisfaction in seeing a planning project go through engineering and construction — all while bringing along community members in celebration and support.

Tara’s most rewarding experience has been growing the strategic communications team in Colorado from four people to 10 in four years. She has a passion for staff development and making work a place of fun and purpose. By creating a team environment full of compassion, grace and hard work ethic, she has grown our strategic communications workload in Colorado 10-fold — giving the team more diverse projects across all of our markets — while still allowing for work-life balance. Tara led her team through COVID-impacted challenges and was able to hire two new staff on the heels of the pandemic, a testament to the communications team’s outstanding client service.