When Habib Motlagh first came to the United States from Iran in 1972, he did so with the understanding that getting a good education was the key to his future success.
“As an immigrant, at least, I understood that in order to get ahead and be successful, a degree, especially in a technical field, would be very helpful,” Motlagh said in an interview with The Riverside Record.
After graduating from the University of Missouri with a degree in civil engineering, Motlagh launched his engineering firm, Tri-Lake Consultants. The firm’s first client was the city of Perris.
“Back in 1988, they hired me as their contract city engineer, and I was their contract city engineer until 2019 when I retired,” Motlagh said. “So for almost 30 years, I was their contract city engineer.”
Motlagh, who sold his company after retiring, has served the city as a contract consultant since 2021 working on special projects.
“I’m still employed under contract with the city,” he said, “but on a much smaller scale.”
Beyond his service to the community as an engineer and consultant, Motlagh also took a special interest in the community’s youth, something Ryan Traylor, who currently works for the city’s engineering department, benefited from as a college student.
“Getting an internship is not that easy,” Traylor said, recalling how Motlagh’s company was the only organization that responded to his letters of interest when he was still in school. “It’s very hard to get an internship with no experience, and when someone like [Motlagh] is willing to take you under his wing and actually give you that experience, it’s definitely needed and really appreciated.”
For three summers, Traylor interned with Motlagh’s company, gaining valuable insight and experience that he now uses on a daily basis to improve the lives of those around him through civil engineering.
“One of the big things when I first got here was he actually let me handle the citywide pavement [rehabilitation] project,” Traylor said. “As somebody that’s a local and drives these roads every day, he let me be in charge of the project to see which roads were messed up and then decide how to fix them, and then going forward, planning for the future of which roads we’d be doing on the next cycle of pavement rehab.”
But Motlagh’s efforts to lift up the youth of the city go even further than providing them with valuable work experience.
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“About 20 years ago or so, I started doing a scholarship every year on a smaller scale,” Motlagh said. “I think I started with like $1,000 [split among] four or five students each year.”
The city council soon got involved, encouraging students to apply for the scholarship and recognizing them at council meetings. Last year, Motlagh did a $5,000 scholarship split evenly between 10 students.
“I realized that $500 now doesn’t do anything, and it maybe buys you a book or two,” Motlagh said. “So I talked to my family, and we decided to maybe go bigger and make a bigger bang for our buck.”
So last November, with a $100,000 donation from Motlagh and a matching $100,000 donation from the city, the Motlagh Scholarship Foundation was formed. Since then, the fund has secured an additional $83,000 in donations and is now accepting applications for its inaugural cohort of scholarship recipients.
“My goal, and the city’s goal, is to make that a $1 million fund [that is] available to support students and use the interest on that and decide how much funding and how many students we can support,” Motlagh said.
For Councilmember Malcolm Corona, who serves on the board of the foundation and is also a math teacher at Perris High School, supporting the effort was the obvious choice.
“We understand that oftentimes there’s some financial concerns when students go off to college,” he said. “So we wanted to also encourage people to kind of further their education and do whatever we could to help them continue their education.”
For this first year, Motlagh said a total of six students will receive $5,000 each. Applications will be accepted through March 31 and can be submitted via email to scholarships@cityofperris.org or in person at City of Perris, 101 North D St. Perris, CA 92570, ATTN: Public Services.
In order to be eligible, students must live in the city of Perris and be graduating high school seniors or transferring from a two-year community college to a four-year university, be majoring in engineering, science or other related field and have a minimum weighted grade point average (GPA) of 3.50 or above.
Applications are set to be reviewed in April with the announcement of the scholarship awards set to happen in May.
“I feel great that I can do something, because Perris was my original first client and has given me a lot of opportunities and made me, I think, who I am today,” Motlagh said. “And I’ve always tried to contribute and help, and hopefully this helps a couple of students to get a degree in engineering and then come back to Perris and work.”
More information about the scholarship, including application materials and how to support the foundation, can be found here on the city’s website.
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