His business is growing - really - in New York.

• Position: Barrett Kays and Associates

If Luciano Pavarotti, Paul Simon, Diana Ross and the pope ever make a mess of your lawn, call Barrett Kays.

Kays, 47, is the president of Barrett Kays & Associates, a Raleigh-based environmental-engineering and landscape-architecture firm. It is helping to restore the 45-acre Great Lawn in New York City's Central Park. The 15-acre oval at the lawn's center is equivalent to nine football fields, but events such as Simon's 1991 concert, which attracted 600,000, and last year's papal mass, which drew 120,000, reduce it to "a dust bowl when it's hot and a mudhole when it rains," Kays says.

The Central Park Conservancy spent $5.2 million, $500,000 of it BKA's consulting fee, over 18 months to repair the lawn and improve drainage. BKA designed a special topsoil, shipped over 60 nights in 5,000 truckloads from Long Island. It also redesigned Belvedere Lake, a 2.5-acre pond next to the lawn. Kays' work is part of an $18.2 million restoration of the Great Lawn set to finish in October 1997. All told, the city is spending $77 million over six years to renovate the park.

Kays has grass roots - his father was a horticulture professor at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater and appeared on a gardening show that aired on public television for 12 years. "He was known as Mr. Oklahoma Gardening," Kays recalls. Kays took classes from his father and got his degree in horticulture from OSU in 1971. He came to N.C. State for his master's in landscape architecture. By 1979, he had a doctorate in soil science.

He started Sunbelt Planning Associates the same year. That became Paton, Kays & Zucchino before Kays left to start his own company in 1983. BKA now employs 25 and grossed between $1 million and $2 million in fees last year.

Kays has done consulting on the Great Lawn since 1984. The tract was a reservoir in the 19th century, then a landfill before the lawn opened in 1936. Over time, the landfill soaked up 235 million gallons of water, making drainage impossible.

The project gave Kays a lesson in engineering and New York politics. "Some of the trees that live on the water under the lawn were donated to the park by the families of very prominent people in the city," he says. "So we had to design two different drainage systems, which remove some of the water without killing the trees."

He trades in sparkles plenty

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