City engineer relishes retirement

When you drive across the Arches interchange, where Newport Boulevard crosses West Coast Highway, you’re using one of Lloyd Dalton’s proudest accomplishments.

The longtime engineer for the city of Newport Beach retired Aug. 3 after a career that spanned four decades. He started out working for the city of Los Angeles, but most of his working life was spent here.

Dalton, 65, instantly recalls when he came to work for Newport Beach: Oct. 1, 1979. He’d seen an ad in a newspaper or an engineering journal, and he had a few interviews in Orange County before getting the city job.

His duties were to see building projects through “from conception to completion.” Dalton would research the project, do design calculations, prepare plans, advertise for and award bids, and oversee construction on projects like the rehabilitation of the Newport and Balboa Piers completed in 2002.

“The ones that I felt were of the most benefit to the public were the ones I enjoyed,” Dalton said, and the Arches interchange was one of his favorites.

It was a 1930s bridge that needed to be widened, and the challenge was to keep traffic flowing during the construction, which was done in the early 1990s.

Engineers actually began demolishing the older bridge and building the new one beside it at the same time, so some driving lanes were always available.

At nearly $16 million for the city’s cost — state funding also paid for the work — the Arches interchange was the most expensive project Dalton worked on for the city, he said.

Dalton will leave other legacies that haven’t yet been enjoyed by the public. He worked on the new Santa Ana Heights fire station and the Newport Coast Community Center, both of which open next month.

“It gave me a lot of satisfaction to see those projects nearly complete before my retirement,” he said.

As much as he enjoyed his work, Dalton doesn’t regret that he won’t be going back to the drawing board.

“I don’t miss it at all — I was so busy there in the last couple of years trying to get everything at a point where I could go away from it,” Dalton said.

Maybe his lack of sentimentality has something to do with the vacation he and his wife, Ruth, plan to start today. They expect to leave for six weeks for Austria and Germany, commencing with a week of offering service at their church’s conference center in Millstatt, Austria.