Amy Cowell wore high heels for her photo session, but placed neatly by her desk at Downtown’s largest construction site are pairs of Wellingtons and work boots for “walking the job.”

Boots are standard issue in her line of work — construction management. Cowell, 46, is one of five project managers overseeing the building of San Diego’s new ballpark. She is one of Douglas E. Barnhart Inc.’s contributions to the joint venture known as San Diego Ballpark Builders. The team is about halfway through the four months it is taking to restart construction on the $459 million ballpark for the San Diego Padres that came to a halt in fall of 2000.

She’s not the only woman on the site, but she’s the only person — man or woman — with the sensitive job of handling the two most dangerous words in construction — change orders.

The Texas native started her career in hammers and nails as a framer in Austin, and soon developed the technical skills for interior features such as coves, vaulted ceilings and niches. It’s the stuff, she says, “that guys don’t like to do and aren’t very good at.”

With an eye toward advancement, Cowell considered a blueprint-reading class at the local community college. But a friend persuaded her to set her sights higher, and she ended up at Texas A & M University earning a degree in building construction. She also married a Marine, and when his orders took him west, they packed themselves and 3-month-old son Travis off to Camp Pendleton.

Not long after, she answered a Barnhart newspaper ad for a construction grad to work in project management. “I got a good feeling when I pulled into the parking lot for my interview and saw several Texas license plates,” she remembers. “And in August, 1991, I got the job with no actual construction experience except as a framer.”

Her first project was Jamacha Elementary School, the first of many schools she would work on. Two weeks later she was assigned to the renovation of UCSD’s landmark Central (now Geisel) Library. Between Jamul, La Jolla and Camp Pendleton, she says, “I have no idea how many miles I put on my Suburban.”

Meanwhile her husband was shipped to Somalia, then Kuwait, so Cowell was single mom to Travis and, four years later, Mason. After her husband’s military retirement in 1995, the family returned to Texas where she took on a travel-intensive job with San Antonio Southern Steel. The road-weary Cowell jumped when Barnhart called to see if she would return to the company to help open a Dallas office.

“We did the last school to open in Dallas under a 30-year-old desegregation court order,” she says. “It was the wettest winter in Texas in 30 years, but we got it done.”

Barnhart offered Cowell’s husband a logistician job in San Diego in 1997, so the family packed up again and returned to the same Oceanside house they had occupied before. She continued with Barnhart as well but, as she says, “life being what life is,” she departed the company a second time for Orange County-based Koll Construction, where her school-building experience was in demand for the high-profile Sage Hill School project in Newport.

But as her career in the male-dominated world of big-time construction management was blooming, her marriage was withering. When her single-mother gig became full-time and permanent, she says, “I started thinking about needing stability to raise the boys properly.”

Her concern led her to call a friend at Barnhart, who told her if she could think quickly and make a fast decision, Barnhart had a great position for her — on the management team of the Downtown ballpark.

“It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, both in scale and complexity,” she says, so she signed on with Barnhart a third time. She’s been at 10th Avenue and K Street ever since, even during the 16-month building hiatus when the on-site staff shrank to four.

“I did anything I could to stay on-site with the project,” she says. “I paid bills, filed, inputted subcontractor data — anything. I knew Doug (Barnhart) had other places to plug me in, but I wasn’t sure I would be able to come back. And I really wanted to come back.”

Doug Barnhart says he never doubted Cowell would remain with the ballpark over the hiatus. “They wanted her down there,” he says, “although I had other ways she could be making money for the company.”

Since the resumption of construction, Cowell handles the touchy topic of change orders. And even the do-it-yourselfer knows changes mean more money. On the politically sensitive ballpark project, Cowell says she is acutely aware of the potential for disaster increased costs represent.

“We pull together everyone we need to, to discuss changes and their cost and whether or not they are necessary.” Those meetings sometimes include Eric Judson, the Padres’ vice president of development and the team’s point man on the ballpark project.

“It’s imperative that a joint venture organization like Ballpark Builders work together, maybe on the largest project they’ve ever done,” he says. “Amy is a superb member of the broader team. She’s quite a taskmaster.”

That Cowell is a woman with a family has figured in Barnhart’s willingness to hire her three different times.

“She left to be with her husband and family. In my mind, family should come before employment, so I don’t hold that against her,” Barnhart says. “This industry is heavily weighted toward males,” he says. “If you can get good female managers that operate well, you should hire them and hold on to them.”

Barnhart is partial to women managers because, he says, “they have more balance and better perspective. The women executives I know place high value on relationships, which is what the construction business is all about. Besides, we do a lot of education building, and there’s a big-time female population there. Sometimes I think they like to deal with other women.”

Today, Cowell concedes that she has dropped off the career ladder and puts employment stability over advancement.

“I know I’ve closed off some options, but you can’t just be yanking kids up and moving them around all over the place,” she says in her lingering Texas twang. “We’ve moved quite a bit, and it did affect the children.”

And she’s tired of moving as well, she says. She has a reliable child care arrangement at her Chula Vista home, which Travis, 11, and Mason, 7, now realize is theirs permanently.

“They can walk to school and have friends in the neighborhood, and that’s good. That’s what I want.”