First female municipal engineer in Allegheny County retires

“It was natural to follow in his footsteps because I was always out on job sites with him,” she said of her father, the late Frederick Omer, founder of The Gateway Engineers Inc. “It’s all I ever knew,” she said. On Tuesday, Ms. Omer, 57, of Upper St. Clair, retired from an engineering career at Gateway that spanned more than 40 years and included serving as municipal engineer for about a dozen communities.

During that time, she usually rose at 5 a.m. and attended a municipal meeting every weeknight of her career, she said.

A civil engineer, Ms. Omer focused on sewer infrastructure work as one of her specialties. Her retirement gifts from municipalities included an engraved sewer pipe and a silver plunger encased in a glass dome.

“Nobody focuses on infrastructure until something goes wrong,” she noted Tuesday.

At the time of her retirement, she was municipal engineer for Brentwood, Churchill, Emsworth, Jefferson Hills, Mount Oliver, Sewickley Heights, Whitehall and Upper St. Clair, supported by a team of engineers from Gateway. She previously had been engineer for Heidelberg.

Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald said Wednesday that Ms. Omer had a very collaborative way of getting people to work together across municipal and political boundaries. She was able to find common ground and discover solutions to complex problems, he said.

Ms. Omer’s father was municipal engineer for Whitehall when the borough was founded in 1948, Whitehall manager Jim Leventry said. Ms. Omer later filled the position.

“2018 will be the first time since 1948 someone with the last name of Omer was not engineer,” Mr. Leventry said Wednesday.

Ms. Omer began working at Gateway Engineers before she went to the University of Pittsburgh, where she earned a degree in civil engineering.

She started her first engineering job for the borough of Mount Oliver in 1982, a year before she graduated from Pitt.