Photo by Solomon Crenshaw Jr.
Amy Zari is the city engineer for Homewood.
Amy Zari said she’s always been a curious person.
“Growing up as a kid, I was always just tinkering with whatever my dad had laying around the house,” Homewood’s new city engineer said. “I always was trying to figure out how things worked and how to solve problems. Just as a person, I love figuring out puzzles.
“To me, a lot of engineering is just a big puzzle,” she continued. “You’ve just got to try to solve the problem, solve equations, figure out the best solution to every problem that you have.”
Zari loved playing with Legos, taking a giant box of the interlocking plastic building blocks and building houses, cars and random objects.
“I did a lot of that, and my dad just always had random auto parts or whatever sitting around,” she recalled. “I’d get my fingers in that and mess around with that a little bit. He was probably annoyed by it.”
Zari remembers taking an elective course at Madison’s Bob Jones High School where students got to intern at an engineering company around Madison and Huntsville.
“That’s when I realized that engineering is something that I want to do and what I’m interested in,” she said. “That kickstarted my desire to attend engineering school and to get my degree.”
The aspiring engineer earned that degree at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. And while she has not yet sought a post-graduate degree, she said she has learned a lot from internships.
“You can only learn so much from school,” she said. “I’ve been interning since my senior year of high school, whether that’s during the summers or during the actual school semesters. That’s where I got most of my real-world knowledge in the engineering field.”
After a year and a half in Jefferson County’s Department of Roads and Transportation, Zari applied to be a senior civil engineer in Homewood.
“I was just aware of an opportunity to come to Homewood and learn under Cale,” she said, referring to Cale Smith, who formerly was Homewood’s city engineer. “It was a great opportunity to get mentored by Cale. That was the initial plan.”
That plan changed a bit when Smith was named interim city manager when Homewood launched its council-manager government. Zari was elevated to interim city engineer, and then Smith hired her as permanent city engineer when he was approved as Homewood’s first permanent city manager.
Hiring Zari was an easy decision, Smith said.
“She’s so talented and brilliant and a really great engineer,” he said. “She’s really good with the community and everybody that lives here. And she works well with all contractors and developers and all the staff in the city. It was really an easy decision.”
Smith said Zari is much more talented than he was in the position.
“She has many more years of experience in the world of traffic engineering and planning,” he said. “We worked together well as a team when we were both upstairs on the fourth floor. I’m still here to help however I can, but she’s really taken the bull by the horns and has done a great job.”
When Zari is not doing that job, she said she enjoys scouting for dining options.
“I love eating,” she said. “My husband and I love looking for new places to eat.”
An ideal day for the couple includes a trip to Edgewood Creamery and then walking in the park with their two 6-year-old dogs, a miniature dachshund and an Italian greyhound.
The two are proud puppy parents.
“They go to day care, so they’re basically like a child,” Zari said.
