Meet the Creek Crew

The People Behind Your State and Local Permits

At Creek Engineering, you are not handed off to a rotating cast of project managers who have never seen your site. You work with the same people from the first call through the last inspection, and those people are the reason the work holds up.

That matters more in this business than it sounds. A licensed engineer has to seal the plans. A certified agent has to do the gopher tortoise survey. A wetland delineation is only worth what the credentials behind it are worth to the agency reviewing your file. So it is fair to ask who is actually doing the work on your project.

Here is who.

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Leadership

Erik Colleen

Vice President – Client Guide

Erik holds a bachelor’s degree in management from Florida Gulf Coast University. What he brings to Creek is an education earned from the engineers he has worked alongside, and a knack for putting high-functioning people in a room and pointing them at something difficult. Creek is what came of that.

His lane at Creek is clients and direction: relationships and support, where the firm is headed, marketing and sales, and contracts and legal work with Creek’s attorneys. In practice, that means he is usually the first person a developer talks to and the one who stays reachable once the project is underway. He is the one asking what the site is actually supposed to become, which agencies are going to have an opinion about it, and whether the project pencils before anyone spends design money finding out.

He is also the person who will tell a client the honest answer, including when the honest answer is that the property may not work. There is always a solution. The question is whether it is an efficient one, and that is a conversation worth having early.

Cory Mentzer

Vice President of Operations

Cory holds three degrees from Florida Gulf Coast University: a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering, a Master of Business Administration, and a Master of Education. He is also an FGCU 2015 Hall of Fame inductee.

With a background that spans engineering, business, education, and leadership, Cory brings a unique perspective to Creek Engineering. He oversees the firm’s operations, administration, and accounting while leading the team and helping guide projects through the many moving parts that happen beyond the engineering itself. He works closely with clients, staff, and municipalities to keep projects organized, moving forward, and focused on the end goal.

Much of Cory’s approach to leadership was shaped during his four years as a high school head football coach. Coaching taught him that strong teams are built through trust, accountability, communication, and a commitment to developing the people around you. He carries those same principles into his work at Creek.

His diverse education and experience allow him to approach challenges from multiple perspectives, but his focus remains simple: build a strong team, serve clients well, and create an environment where people can do their best work.

Outside of Creek, Cory enjoys spending time with his wife, Kyrstin, and their two sons, Judah and Isaiah.

Julian Lapidus, PE

Engineering Manager

Julian is a licensed Florida Professional Engineer and leads Creek’s engineering work. He grew up outside Sacramento and earned his Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering, cum laude, from California State University, Sacramento, working for a small infrastructure design firm while he was still in school.

His career since has run both sides of the permitting counter. At the California State Water Resources Control Board he wrote NPDES permits (National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, the permits that govern what a site is allowed to discharge and where), presented project impacts to the communities those projects affected, and answered the public’s questions about them. He then moved to Florida and was hired as a plans reviewer for Charlotte County Utilities, and from there went to Naples to do development and infrastructure design for LJA, a national design firm, before joining Creek.

That agency time is worth pausing on. Most engineers only ever see permitting from the applicant’s chair: you submit a package and wait to find out what a reviewer thinks of it. Julian has sat in the other chair twice, once for a state agency and once for a county utility. He knows what a reviewer is actually looking for in a submittal, what gets a set kicked back, and what a comment means when it is written in agency language.

He also holds an FDOT Approved Advanced Temporary Traffic Control certificate, earned in October 2026.

At Creek he focuses on commercial civil site planning and utilities. Outside of work he swims and travels.

Some Of Our Creek Crew

Doug Williams

Field Supervisor

Doug is an Associate Ecologist, a Certified Environmental Health Professional (CEHP), an FWC Authorized Gopher Tortoise Agent, and a certified wetland delineator. He runs environmental and civil field work at Creek: the hand auger, the GPS unit, and the parcel nobody has walked yet.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Maryville University, with an emphasis in environmental sustainability and stewardship, and has spent nearly a decade in the environmental field. He built that career here, which matters more than it sounds: doing this work inside an engineering firm is a different job than doing it for an agency or a consultancy. The survey has to hold up as the basis for a design and a permit, not just as a report.

Those credentials are not decoration. Gopher tortoise relocation and wetland delineation are permitted activities, and the agency reviewing the file wants to know who did the work and whether that person was authorized to do it. Doug’s authorizations are the reason Creek can handle those steps in-house instead of subcontracting them out and waiting on someone else’s schedule.

Jake Robson

Staff Engineer

Jake is an EIT and a Certified Environmental Health Professional, and he is preparing to sit for the Professional Engineer exam, the final step to licensure. He was raised in Southwest Florida and holds a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Engineering from the U.A. Whitaker College of Engineering at Florida Gulf Coast University. The region is not just where he works. It is the ground he grew up on, the same soils, water table, and weather that impact the reports and projects the firm publishes every day.

He is an original member of the Creek crew. He came up through the field and has worked nearly every part of the firm’s civil and geotechnical practice: soils and compaction testing on site, the lab work that turns a field sample into a number a design can rely on, and the inspections and reports that follow. He is also the one who checks the field crew’s data before it goes out. That review is where a design recommendation or geotechnical report either earns its factor of safety or does not. Jake treats it that way — not as a formality, but as the last chance to catch what the site is actually telling you.

Outside of work, Jake is an avid outdoorsman and a self-described nerd. He has a talent for reading a map and finding exactly what he is after, especially a good fishing spot. The same patience he uses on the water — wait, watch, check again — is the same patience he brings to a boring log, a lab sheet, and a report that has to stand up.

Janice Dudley

Civil Specialist

Janice holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communication from Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. She came to Creek from a career as a technical trainer, teaching HR skills, computer software, and IT subject matter for corporate clients, and from helping run her family’s home improvement and property management business. She grew up in Metro Detroit and now lives in Punta Gorda.

At Creek she handles project coordination, permitting, regulatory research, and client communication. In practice that makes her the person who keeps a project organized between design and approval, working with the engineers, the client, outside consultants, and the review agencies at the same time. The job is making sure all four are working from the same information. The agencies reviewing a project do not talk to each other, and by default neither does everyone working on it. Someone has to close that gap.

Janice is also a full-time licensed Realtor with REAL Broker, LLC, and she helps Creek clients think through land acquisitions, expansions, and whether a parcel will support what they intend to build. She serves on the board of the REALTORS® of Punta Gorda-Port Charlotte-North Port-DeSoto, and she is active in her church.

Outside of work, Janice is a classical musician who plays timpani in two community concert bands. She is a devoted Detroit Lions, Tigers, and Red Wings fan, and she will happily show you pictures of her doodles.

Jacob Long

Field Technician II

Jacob holds a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Conservation and Management from Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, where his coursework centered on environmental policy, habitat preservation and remediation, and wildlife behavior and physiology. He holds GIS certifications and is working toward his Certified Environmental Health Professional credential.

He came to Creek from the Army, where he served as an infantryman on a heavy weapons squad with the 101st Airborne Division, 2nd Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment, the “No Slack” regiment, on deployments to Eastern Europe and Syria. Since then he has worked for Colorado Parks and Wildlife on public lands and wildlife management, and for the City of Durango’s Forestry Division on forestry and fire management.

At Creek he runs compaction testing, dynamic cone penetrometer (DCP) testing, mapping, and environmental assessments, and he assists on gopher tortoise and soil surveys. That span is the useful part. The same parcel that needs a bearing number for a foundation may also hold a burrow that has to be permitted before anything moves, and one person who can do both means Creek is not scheduling two trips and two vendors to answer one question about one site.

Outside of work, Jacob is an avid outdoorsman who fishes, hunts, camps, and snowboards, and he practices Muay Thai.

Board of Directors

Creek Engineering is governed by a six-member board of directors.

Jon Colleen

Chairman of the Board

Jon founded Creek Engineering and serves as Chairman of the Board. The firm was built on the conviction he set at the start: accurate data, gathered on site, and clear communication with the people relying on it. That is still the standard the work is held to.

Cory and Erik run day-to-day operations. Jon holds formal oversight authority in the company and stays involved in where it is headed.

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