We came to build.
This is our story.

We hired the City's own people to make sure we did it right.

A Black-owned contractor doing the most work in the program knew it would be watched more closely than anyone else. So Gayanga built a compliance operation that no other demolition contractor its size carried — and paid for it entirely out of City contract margins.

Gayanga did it by going to the people who already knew the City's rules and paying them more to enforce those rules inside the company. Where the City required one designated project manager per contract, Gayanga assigned a full team, so that every stage of every site had overlapping oversight — and every one of those people had been recruited from the City, the Land Bank, or the largest union demolition firms in the region.

• Eric Higgs — Chief Financial Officer. Recruited from the City of Detroit, where he served as Deputy CFO and Chief Accounting Officer for a decade after the bankruptcy; a CPA trained at a national accounting firm. Hired in 2023 to align Gayanga's financial systems, controls, and reporting with the standards the City itself required.
• Sara Hernandez — Compliance and Quality Control. Recruited in 2023 from the City of Detroit's demolition compliance department. Handled every invoice and compliance package and served as the final quality-control check between the field and the City.
• Ericka Meah — Director of Field Operations. Recruited from the City of Detroit's General Services Department to run Gayanga's field operations across demolition, trucking, and backfill. She left Gayanga to become Chief Operating Officer of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department — a promotion the company was proud of, and a measure of the caliber of people it hired.
• Shantelle Hardaway — Engineering Support. Recruited from the Detroit Land Bank Authority. Ran the property-tracking system that followed every job from wrecking permit to final grade.
• John Maranian — Safety and Environmental Compliance Manager. A union safety professional recruited from Independence Excavating, previously with Homrich. From 2022 on he had free rein over safety and environmental compliance on every Gayanga site, backfill included.
• Project managers and general superintendents. Degreed engineers and construction managers — senior project managers like Ed Davis, with degrees in engineering and construction management from programs including Morehouse and the University of Michigan and decades of combined experience — and general superintendents recruited from Barton Malow and Detroit Dismantling ran the work day to day.
• Field staff. Recruited from Adamo, Blaze, and the region's other top union demolition firms. All union, all experienced, and paid top wages to ensure quality — because quality people, paid well, do the right thing.

Superintendents and foremen were paid above union scale. The finance, operations, and safety leads — including dedicated, full-time safety professionals — were paid well into six figures. Even the support roles were paid to keep the paperwork perfect, and every one of them had the autonomy to do their jobs. All of it was dedicated to City of Detroit work. That level of staffing and compensation was not excessive. It was necessary. It worked. From 2016 until the September 2025 suspension, every complaint or inquiry raised against Gayanga was examined and found unsubstantiated. The most thorough test was the first investigation by the City of Detroit Office of Inspector General (the City's OIG). A company doing this much work draws complaints, and this one began with an allegation — later found unsubstantiated — about an individual's handling of backfill load tickets, not about the company's process. Gayanga still had to answer it, at its own expense and on its own time. It turned over everything: where every load of dirt came from, the City's approval of each source, and the load tickets for every site. The City of Detroit Office of Inspector General then brought Gayanga's field and office staff in one at a time for individual interviews — the superintendents, foremen, and operators who actually ran the backfill, and the office staff who processed the tickets — with no company leadership in the room. Every one of them described the same process. On September 27, 2023, the OIG closed the case, reporting that it did not find evidence to substantiate the allegations. Gayanga was cleared — and responded by moving its backfill to City-listed public sources and City-approved suppliers anyway. That is what a real investigation looked like: everyone was called in, everything was produced, and the conclusion followed the evidence. Two years later, on the same subject, the same office did none of it — no interviews of the crews who did the work, no request for the tickets, no call to the supplier it named — before publishing its findings. To Gayanga, the difference was the whole story. The 2023 investigation was an inquiry. The 2025 one felt, from the first day, like an investigation with its conclusion already written.

It was not the first time Gayanga had been tested in public and cleared in the record. In 2019, after the Historic Woodland apartment building came down, a local media personality ran a series claiming Gayanga had released asbestos into the neighborhood. The facts were different. The building had been ordered demolished as unsafe to enter, with asbestos left in place under the state's own rules for such structures; Gayanga ran a Dust Boss misting system throughout the takedown and had an environmental firm perform air monitoring during the demolition. The state's review came down to a notification form — a box that should have been updated, and an ordered-demolition letter the City's building authority had not attached. On September 17, 2019, the City's demolition appeals board reviewed the air-monitoring data and dust-suppression records and cleared Gayanga, finding no evidence of improper demolition work. Gayanga's response was to hire an in-house industrial hygienist so that every environmental notification and every site would have a specialist on it from then on.

1. BSEED open-hole inspection. No backfill could be scheduled until City inspectors approved that the excavation was clear of all debris and the sewer was capped.
2. City-approved sources only. Material came exclusively from sources approved by the City's environmental consultant, AKT Peerless, or from the public source list published by the City's Construction & Demolition Department.
3. A City field liaison who could show up at any time. Under the City's own policy, its field liaisons could arrive unannounced at any site, stop the work, and approve or reject what they saw. After the 2023 investigation, Gayanga's sites were the most scrutinized in the program — liaisons stopped, inspected, and signed off constantly.
4. Every source approved by the City's consultant. AKT Peerless had to approve every source of material before a load moved. Many of the sources Gayanga proposed were not approved — and were not used.
5. Documentation the City checked — and audited. Load tickets and photos for every delivery, reviewed by Gayanga's compliance specialist against the City's own liaison inspections before any invoice went out. In January 2025 the City's Construction & Demolition Department ran its own audit of Gayanga's backfill data and documentation, pulling sites at random and reviewing them "for completeness and consistency." The one discrepancy it asked about was a truck number written as "19" on a form and "198" on the matching ticket.
6. Winter or final grade approval. BSEED inspected and approved the finished grade before the site was closed.
7. Voluntary switch to public sources. At the end of 2023, after the OIG inquiry cleared Gayanga of any backfill wrongdoing, the company voluntarily moved from a City-approved private source to the City's own public sources and to City-recommended brokered trucking — at an added cost of roughly $4,000 to $5,000 per property.