Tetra Tech Wins Port of LA and Military Contracts

Pasadena-based Tetra Tech Inc. secured two new contracts in March, one tied to the Port of Los Angeles and one to the U.S. military’s global supply chain.

The first deal, announced March 24, came from the Los Angeles Harbor Department. It’s a three-year contract to provide environmental and technical services across the Port of Los Angeles, which is currently working through a multi-year $2.6 billion infrastructure investment program. For an engineering firm headquartered in the San Gabriel Valley, the work is essentially in its own backyard. Tetra Tech scientists, engineers, and technical specialists will handle environmental site assessment and restoration across the port’s 7,500 acres of land and 43 miles of waterfront, a scope that covers stormwater and groundwater monitoring, compliance assessments, remedial investigations, and the design and execution of restoration plans for impacted properties.

The relationship between Tetra Tech and the port isn’t new.

“Tetra Tech has provided environmental science and engineering solutions to support the Port of Los Angeles in its environmental initiatives and commitment to responsibly managing resources for more than 30 years,” Roger Argus, Tetra Tech’s new chief executive, told LA Business Journal in the announcement. “We look forward to continuing to use our ‘leading with science’ approach to support POLA in facilitating global trade while protecting human health and the environment.”

Argus stepped into the chief executive role in February as part of a planned leadership transition. Former chief executive Dan Batrack had held the position for 20 years before moving to executive chairman. That kind of deliberate handoff is relatively rare in the consulting world, where CEO departures often come with less runway, and it signals that Tetra Tech’s board wasn’t looking for a strategic pivot so much as a steady continuation of existing work.

The port contract fits that pattern. Environmental remediation and monitoring at large port facilities is long-cycle, methodical work. It doesn’t get headlines the way a splashy tech deal might, but it’s the kind of recurring, compliance-driven engagement that keeps an engineering firm’s utilization rates stable year over year.

The second contract is a different animal entirely.

On March 17, the Defense Logistics Agency awarded Tetra Tech a $14 million task order under an enterprise technology services contract. The agency manages the military’s procurement of spare parts, fuel, food, clothing, and other supplies for combat forces worldwide. What Tetra Tech gets to do under this task order is narrower but technically dense: sustaining, modernizing, and transitioning automated material handling equipment systems, integrating augmented reality and voice technology systems, and supporting upgrades to the agency’s warehouse management infrastructure.

Defense supply chain work. $14 million. Global scope.

“We look forward to continuing to use our industry-leading IT, operations technology, and cybersecurity expertise to secure the supply chain infrastructure that supports defense readiness worldwide,” Argus said.

The Defense Logistics Agency contract is worth paying attention to beyond the dollar figure. Augmented reality and voice tech integration inside military warehouse systems isn’t typical environmental consulting work. It shows Tetra Tech pushing further into operational technology, a category that sits at the junction of physical infrastructure and digital systems management. For a firm that built its name on soil contamination and water quality work, the defense IT business represents a deliberate broadening of its revenue base.

From a Southern California business perspective, Tetra Tech’s March announcements reflect something the region’s engineering sector has been doing quietly for years. Firms like Tetra Tech don’t chase the dramatic pivots of consumer tech companies in Culver City or the streaming buildouts shaping employment in Burbank. They accumulate. A three-year port services extension here, a federal task order there. The Port of Los Angeles handles roughly $300 billion in trade annually, and the environmental obligations attached to that kind of industrial activity don’t shrink when budgets tighten.

Tetra Tech reported roughly 28,000 employees globally as of its most recent filings, with corporate headquarters in Pasadena. The company operates across water, environment, infrastructure, resource management, and government services sectors. The back-to-back March announcements give Argus a visible early win heading into his first full quarter as chief executive, reinforcing continuity with the strategy Batrack built across two decades. Whether the Defense Logistics Agency relationship expands beyond this $14 million task order will likely depend on how well Tetra Tech executes the warehouse systems work in the coming year.