So what happens when you add an environmental engineer to the mix on the Waco City Council? Probably a lot of solutions that few of us ever imagined for problems few of us really want to think about.

Well, Addis McNamara wants us to think about it. The lanky, gregarious, 59-year-old engineer appeared out of the blue at the last minute to run for mayor. Likely, it’ll be an uphill battle, especially when weary voters are awash in elections. Jim Bush, 67, a commercial builder on the council since 2005, is also running for the post and promises to carry on the popular causes of Mayor Virginia DuPuy, including education and battling poverty.

Bush comes from a century’s worth of builders and is well known in our town. McNamara hails from a famous local family, too, and is proud of his heritage. He says his great-grandfather, John McNamara, was an engineer of a different sort on the first train to pull into Waco.

I’d describe Addis McNamara as an engineering populist, if you can conceive it. Kind of like Ross Perot but taller. During a Trib editorial board interview, he continually voiced faith in private sources to fully tackle such costly community amenities as a performing arts center (to replace the Waco Hippodrome) and a fixed-line trolley extending from Baylor University into Cameron Park.

His favorite word: pragmatic.

Ideas? He’s got lots of them, probably typical of veteran engineers.

Visionary: Certainly. In fact, he won’t stop talking about high-speed rail as the panacea of our times. Last time I saw him as the elevator doors closed, he was still talking about high-speed rail.

That’s not to say he knows everything. His career has taken him to different assignments all over the state, including the Permian Basin where he served as district manager at a refinery: “I’ll tell you, I was naive. When I first moved out there, I took my ski boat with me. I had the only ski boat in Midland, Texas.”

Along the way, McNamara became familiar with another Bush — this one a young oil producer who spent plenty of time at the local Petroleum Club.

“Midland was a small town in those days and everybody knew each other,” he said, “and the form of entertainment obviously was entertaining each other because there’s absolutely nothing to do.”

McNamara worries that others think too small. As an environmental engineer with his own business, he dismisses recent public pleas about car-pooling from a Heart of Texas Council of Governments air-quality advisory committee as being “in the right spirit” but insignificant in truly eluding tightening smog regulations in Waco.

“The biggest polluter is I-35,” he told us. “That’s the problem. Too many cars, too much congestion, coming through Waco. And the monitoring station they have was set right to the east of I-35 in the Bellmead area. We have one monitoring station and it’s going to determine the quality of the entire county? That’s not the way you do it.”

He believes foresight could’ve eliminated a worsening situation, precluding places like the local Flying J Travel Plaza from setting up where it did. With many trucks running their engines much of the time in the parking lot, it only adds to the problem.

Effective planning by local and state leaders, he says, would have placed this popular truck stop several miles south instead. Of course, this sort of government intervention into private enterprise isn’t exactly popular, but McNamara stresses the critical wisdom of master planning.

“It’s like the elevator,” he says of the environment. “If you’re one person in an elevator, you can do whatever you want. When you have two people, you can kind of do whatever you want to. If you fill the elevator up, you don’t have a lot of rights because there’s people all around you.”

One could argue the council already has an engineer: City Manager Larry Groth, whom Bush voices complete confidence in.

McNamara echoes minor grumbling about Groth’s management style but does acknowledge that, Groth being an engineer, he “obviously has a very good technical background.”

Spoken like an engineer.