In development, the ribbon cutting is often treated like the finish line. It’s the moment when the building opens, the photos get taken, the speeches happen, and the project is celebrated as a completed success. But the real test of a building starts once people begin using it.

In civic development, the buildings and infrastructure we deliver are meant to serve communities for decades. Success isn’t defined by whether a project made it through procurement, design, and construction. It’s defined by whether the building actually works well, day after day, for the people who use it.

That perspective became much clearer to me through the Howard County Courthouse project.

Living With a Project After Delivery

Howard County, Maryland undertook the largest infrastructure project in the county’s history: a new courthouse delivered through a public-private partnership. It was also the county’s first P3 project, which meant the stakes were high for everyone involved.

Edgemoor served as the development partner, and the project was ultimately delivered on time and on budget (actually a day early) despite the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But one aspect of the project made the experience particularly instructive. Instead of stepping away after construction was complete, our team remained involved during the operations and maintenance period. For three years, we were responsible for the facility after it opened.

That experience changed how we think about development.

Most developers never see their projects through that stage. Once a building opens, the development team typically moves on to the next pursuit. But operating a facility you helped create gives you a very different vantage point. You begin to see how design decisions, operational assumptions, and stakeholder expectations actually play out once the building is in daily use, and it becomes very clear which decisions made during development truly mattered.

Seeing the Building Through the User’s Eyes

The courthouse brought together a wide range of user groups that had previously been spread across multiple buildings, including the Clerk of the Courts, the Register of Wills, the Sheriff’s Office, the State’s Attorney, court administration, and several judicial functions.

Each of these groups had different needs, priorities, and expectations for how the building should function, which meant bringing them together under one roof required a tremendous amount of coordination long before the building opened.

Working through that process reinforced an important point for us. A successful civic project is not simply about delivering a structure. It is about creating an environment that allows the people inside that structure to do their jobs better.

If a courthouse allows the justice system to operate more efficiently, the project has succeeded. If a civic building enables public employees to serve the community more effectively, that is also a measure of success. And if the people who use the space every day feel that the environment supports their work instead of getting in the way, then the building is doing what it was meant to do.

Spending time on the operational side of a project reinforces this perspective in ways that are difficult to fully appreciate during development. When a building is used every day, you begin to see how systems actually perform, where flexibility in the design becomes important, and how maintenance decisions influence the long term performance of the facility.

You also see how people respond to the space. Individuals who work in the building every day quickly develop strong opinions about what works well and what does not. Observing how they interact with the building provides a deeper understanding of whether the project truly achieved what it set out to accomplish.

Experiences like that shape how you approach the next project because they reinforce the importance of making development decisions with the end user in mind.

Thinking Beyond the Ribbon Cutting

Experiences like the Howard County project have changed how we approach development work. A question that comes up frequently inside our team is simple: what happens after delivery?

If we are not thinking about that throughout the development process, there is a good chance we are missing something important. We try to consider whether the building will function the way users actually need it to, whether the systems will perform reliably over time, whether the design supports the mission of the institution occupying the space, and whether the client will still feel confident about the decisions that were made years later.

Those questions do not start at ribbon cutting. They start at the very beginning of the project.

This perspective matters even more in civic development because public projects operate under a different level of accountability. These buildings are not private assets serving a single owner. They serve communities, support public institutions, and exist in the public eye. When a project succeeds, the benefits are visible for decades. When it fails, the consequences are just as visible.

Keeping that responsibility in mind changes how decisions get made throughout the life of the project.

Interestingly, the most rewarding moments in this work rarely happen during procurement or at ribbon cutting. Those milestones are exciting, and winning a pursuit always brings energy to a team, but the moments that stay with you usually come later.

They come when someone tells you the facility works better than what was there before. They come when a client expresses pride in the outcome. And they come when you see a community benefiting from something that took years of effort to bring to life.

Those are the moments that remind us why these projects matter in the first place.