Lori Manni knows her way around a sewer system. She’s spent the better part of two decades building miles of them. It’s not a far cry from the work of her father, Tom Manni, who made his living building residential foundations.
“He’d drive me to school,” she said. “His truck smelled like concrete and oil.”
Today, she’s president of Capital City Construction and Management Services Inc., a company that specializes in the concrete used in commercial buildings, as well as erosion control, landscaping and project management.
Manni grew up in Cranston with two brothers and a sister. When she was in elementary school, she’d ask for homework.
“I wasn’t a nerd, but I’d cry if I couldn’t go to class,” she said.
In high school, she was in the top 10 in her class of 400, and was also a cheerleader, in student government, a band and the Italian club.
“I hated to miss anything,” she said.
From the time she was a kid, she wanted to be a lawyer and worked for a title attorney while she was still in high school.
“It was so boring,” she said. “I’d picked the wrong specialty.”
At the same time, she was stuffing envelopes for her mother, who did the family’s company books.
“My mom suggested I should find a job with an accountant, and I loved it. It was organizing and orderly and that’s how my brain works,” she said.
Manni headed off to Boston College’s Carroll School of Management, where she majored in accounting.
“It was a challenge,” she said. “Most of the students in my class had an accounting background and I really didn’t. I learned so much.”
After graduating in 1984, she worked in Boston as an auditor for a large accounting firm and became a certified public accountant along the way.
But Boston rents were sky high, she says, and the prospect of living with six roommates wasn’t appealing. After a couple of years, she switched to commuting. But traveling four hours a day was a grind. She moved back to Rhode Island and got a job as a senior auditor with Ernst & Young.
During that time, her brother, Steve Manni, had taken over the family business, which focused on residential foundations. He was good at planning, but he asked her to take over the administrative side. There were no computers, and he was doing everything via spreadsheets.
“I said, ‘Yes, I could do this for a while.’ It turned out to be fun,” Manni said.
She stayed for 14 years, then opened her own construction company, a union shop. But after a few years, she stepped aside for personal time.
Eventually, she got the itch to get back into business and launched Capital City Construction and Management Services in Cranston in 2011.
“I realized I had to do something; it’s in my fiber,” she said.
From there, she says business has boomed. Manni handles the administrative and project management side of the company, which has 23 employees.
A primary focus is the Narragansett Bay Commission’s wastewater treatment facility, a massive project that services more than 350,000 people. Manni’s company handled all 12,200 precast concrete segments that line the 2.2-mile subterranean tunnel 150 feet underground.
“Fishing and swimming in the bay are possible because of this giant system,” she said.
Manni’s company has also installed compost filter socks – those sausage-shaped berms that line the edges of Rhode Island’s highway construction projects. Some 90,000 of them stretch along parts of Route 146 and Route 37. They are filled with composted material.
The berms are more efficient than hay bales in controlling run-off, Manni says.
Her company is also doing the signage at Centreville Bank Stadium in Pawtucket, the new Central Falls High School, as well as 7 miles of signs for the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority’s new Green Line in Somerville, Mass.
Manni still lives in Cranston, where she, her siblings and her dad went to Bain Middle School, one of the city’s oldest schools. One day when she was dropping off her daughter, she noticed the school’s exterior needed repairs.
“I asked the principal if we could do a refresh and replace the front apron, no charge,” she said.
Manni lined up volunteers to do the demolition work and poured a giant concrete slab to enhance the building’s facelift.
Manni said Women’s Business Enterprise, a nonprofit that mentors women-owned businesses, provided professional guidance for her company. And as a big supporter of her church, she also credits the grace of God for her success and well-being.
“I was a pioneer in this business. When I started, women weren’t in the sandbox with the boys,” she said. “I’ve had people call me ‘honey.’ Even in 2025, I’m still seeing sexist behavior, but I love this business. It’s always changing, but it makes me feel challenged.”
