Surprise! Sophisticated Public-Sector Projects Energize Construction Industry

The East Bay is now packed with pricey--and cutting edge--projects. Civic structures in Alameda and Oakland incorporate dramatic designs and costly construction materials. One architect said the Solano County Government Center in Fairfield "doesn't feel like an institutional building."

By Brian Higgins

At a January 2004 fund-raiser to celebrate the upcoming construction of Alameda's long overdue library, guests took full advantage of an invitation to spray-paint the walls of the seedy LinOaks Motel, which was due to meet the wrecking ball in order to make room for the 45,000-sq.-ft. library.

The $20 million Cesar Chavez Education Center in the Oakland Unified School District opened last year, becoming the district's first school to be built from the ground up in three decades. The district has budgeted $584 million for approximately 250 projects-about half of which general contractor McCarthy Building Cos. will handle or already has (photo courtesy of McCarthy Building Cos.).

But when asbestos was discovered in the final check before demolition, the razing of the LinOaks was delayed--for several months--and the city was left with a graffiti-covered eyesore. Volunteers scrambled to repaint the doomed structure, which was finally leveled, fresh paint and all, in May 2004.

But the writing was on the wall in Alameda-and, for that matter, all of the East Bay. Public-sector projects in the past year pushed past all sorts of barriers; asbestos, law suits and even the stigma of institutionalization.

An Active Alameda

"We've issued more than $100 million in building permits in the past 12 months," said Alameda Mayor Beverly Johnson, noting that figure includes "the most significant public projects in 50 years, easily, and maybe 100 years."

Construction on Alameda's two-story, brick-and-cast stone library is just getting underway, with S.J. Amoroso of Redwood City serving as general contractor and Consolidated CM of Oakland as construction manager. Thomas Hacker Architects has designed a front façade as a three-bay colonnade that relates to Alameda's City Hall and Old Post Office.

Additionally, Johnson has vowed that a $25 million overhaul of the city's historic theater, which was built in 1932, but hasn't shown in a movie in 26 years, will meet its Sept. 2006 completion deadline even if she has to enact a writ of eminent domain over the theater's current owner-with whom the city has made little progress in negotiations.

"I'm very determined to keep the process going," Johnson said.

Busy in Berkeley

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Nearby, UC Berkeley's public projects are showing the most significant signs of life of the new millennium, according to school spokesperson Christine Shaff.

St. Louis-based McCarthy Building Cos. is more than a year into the construction of a $162 million, 285,000-sq.-ft. facility that will replace UC Berkeley's Stanley Hall. The new facility will also be called Stanley Hall, which is considerably friendlier on the tongue than the Bioengineering, Biotechnology and Quantitative Biomedical Research Institute that will be headquartered within.

The new facility, scheduled for completion in 2006, will house a 900-megahertz nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer, a high-powered device that allows scientists to create images that show the structures of proteins.

Just up the road, McCarthy is also busy on the Chang-Lin Tien Center's new C.V. Starr East Asian Library, which is due for groundbreaking this month and scheduled for completion in summer 2007. Architect for the project is New York-based Tod Williams Billie Tsien and Associates.

Berkeley High School's new food court on Oregon Street. The school will start a new phase of construction later this year that will include an adult education complex (photo courtesy of Timothy Hursley).

The proposed four-floor, 67,700-sq.-ft. library will hold more than 700,000 bound volumes and includes a poured-in-place concrete frame with a steel roof structure. The exterior will be clad in granite with a clay tile roof.

"Our biggest capital projects are bound to seismic retrofitting and housing," said Shaff, who added that UC Berkeley's apparently healthy construction budget doesn't compare to the halcyon days before the dot-com bubble burst in the Bay Area.

Nonetheless, the university also has annexed neighboring Albany to pour $95.3 million into an upgrade of the University Village housing facility, due for completion in 2008. Schaff noted that the expanded housing is necessary to serve the needs of "Tidal Wave 2," a new generation of baby-boomers that is expected to swell UC Berkeley's undergrad population by nearly 25 percent to 40,000 by 2010.

But the city of Berkeley, which has generally partnered in harmony with the hometown school has taken issue with the university's plans to develop 2.2 million sq. ft. of office space and other projects.

"As a proud alumnus of the University of California, I'm disappointed that we're here today to file the lawsuit," said Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates after the city sued the university to halt development in February, citing a litany of environmental concerns. "But we want a fair and lasting partnership with the university."

There are no such issues between city and college 20 mi. south on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. That's where Warren Hall, the 12-story signature building on the hilltop campus of Cal State East Bay (formerly Cal State Hayward) and visible for miles along the heavily trafficked Interstate 880 corridor, is about to get an expensive shave.

When California voters approved the Statewide School Repair and Construction Bond Act in March of 2004, more than $30 million was allocated for seismic work on 34-year-old, 194-ft.-high Warren Hall, where several floors will be razed.

"The reason that the required seismic retrofit of Warren Hall is so expensive is, quite simply, the height of the existing building," said Cal State East Bay President Norma Rees in a memo to all employees. "In place of spending that $31 million to retrofit an old building, we would be allocated those funds to build an entirely new building on another part of the campus."

Rees estimated that a further savings of "at least tens of millions of dollars" was possible because bond retrofit money did not include complete asbestos abatement in Warren Hall and upgrades to elevators, lighting and air handling equipment.

A New Age for Public Projects

For a variety of reasons-financial incentives not least among them- public works projects are on the uptake. Five years ago, when the city of Berkeley opened the bid process for what turned out to be a $30 million expansion of its high school, the response wasn't exactly resounding.

"There just weren't many people bidding on public works projects," said David Petta, a principal with Berkeley-based ELS Architects, whose firm overhauled and extended the Berkeley High campus between 2001 and '04. "Only three generals bid, and because there wasn't much competition, the bids came in quite a bit higher than the estimates."

Those days are long gone.

"With the hospital work and education work in the East Bay, it's been phenomenal," said Steve Jennemann, McCarthy's project director for the Oakland Unified School District, which has budgeted $584 million for approximately 250 projects-about half of which McCarthy will handle or already has. "I think it's been slowly arriving over the past three years."

As of April, McCarthy had 15 projects in design and 26 more in pre-design for OUSD, which is going full steam ahead with capital improvements despite an exodus of students and a budget so awash in red ink that a state takeover was mandated in 2003. Randall Ward, the state-appointed OUSD superintendent for the last two years, has made facilities upgrades a core component of his administration.

The district's most visible project, the $20 million Cesar Chavez Education Center, was built on the former site of the Montgomery Ward building in Oakland's largely Hispanic Fruitvale District after City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente waged an aggressive campaign to have the historic building leveled.

The Chavez Center, opened last year, was the first Oakland school built from the ground up in more than three decades.

De La Fuente, who also serves as co-chair of the Coliseum Joint Powers Authority, has his eye on his own construction legacy--a new baseball stadium for the Oakland A's.

"We don't have $400 million we can give to the A's," said De La Fuente, who has built a sizable war chest for the Oakland mayoral bid that he is heavily favored to win when Jerry Brown's second term expires in 2006. "But we do have the expertise to craft a financial structure that allows them to build a stadium."

With the A's new owner, Lewis Wolff, recently taking over, De La Fuente's prediction of a new stadium within three years has taken on a powerful ally.

Cal's 72,000-seat football stadium awaits a costly seismic retrofit (photo courtesy of UC Berkeley).

But that's pie in the sky for now.

Equally vague are the plans for an announced $100 million retrofitting for UC Berkeley's 72,000-seat Memorial Stadium-a figure that some construction industry analysts believe may double by the time anything concrete comes about.

Pushing the issue to the fore has been the abrupt reversal of fortune for Cal's downtrodden football program under coach Jeff Tedford. With big crowds once again swelling the crumbling 82-year-old stadium, situated directly atop the volatile Hayward Fault, Tedford recently signed a contract extension with the caveat that he soon wanted to see construction crews in Memorial Stadium.

The university, which is far from funding the project, subsequently announced, with few details, that the retrofitting is officially under way.

On the eastern fringe of the East Bay, Fairfield's Solano County Government Center-which opened for business in April-gives a new meaning to public works architecture.

"The public sector has learned a lot from the private sector about how you treat employees," said Morteza Alvani of Johnson-Fain Partners in San Francisco, architect for the 300,000-sq.-ft., environmentally friendly center.

"When you get off for lunch, they don't want you to sit behind your computer; they want you to get out and enjoy yourself," Alvani said. "When you are visiting the government center, you don't feel like you're in an institutional building. The landscaping and plazas (there are three) are designed for people to gather."