Central Valley Market Report

The transformation of the 1960s-era B.F. Sisk Courthouse in Fresno is a complete “gut and renovation” project

By Greg Aragon

It may not appear so from the outside, but inside the five-story concrete shell of the old B.F. Sisk Courthouse in Fresno, a new $70-million ($56 million in construction costs) Superior Courthouse is taking shape.

“We are completely transforming the interior of this 1960s federal court building into a modern courthouse,” says David Moore, lead architect for the San Francisco office of SmithGroup Architecture. “It’s a complete gut and renovation.”

The 192,000-sq-ft make-over broke ground in July 2008 and is scheduled for completion in late 2010.

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The project owner is the Judicial Council of California - Administrative Office of the Courts. Rutherford and Chekene of San Francisco is serving as structural engineer and New York City-based Turner Construction is construction manager.

Turner was selected through a best-value delivery method, which is essentially the same as CM-at-risk, says Moore. He says the owner went through the normal CM-at-risk process of quality and competitive selection, with firms submitting proposals.

“But after the proposals, there was an interview panel set up to interview the firms,” says Moore, who was a member of the selection panel. “In this arrangement the owner has some flexibility in supporting the contractor on changes and the contractor doesn’t get hurt in this equation unless he does something really stupid.”

One of the B.F. Sisk courtrooms, as envisioned by SmithGroup.

Barry Owens, Turner project executive, says with this delivery method, the owner gets the “benefit of the CM builder onboard during the earliest point of design” to help price the project, provide value engineering and support the design team.

When finished, the structure will house the Superior Court of California, County of Fresno, and feature 15 new courtrooms.

Highlights include administrative offices, holding cells, café, child-care center, electronic public information devices and architectural features to improve public navigation throughout the building.

“The big architectural improvement was that we brought great clarity to how the public will find its way through the building, starting with the lobby and going through security and to make the clerk offices and the courtrooms,” Moore says. “And so there are a lot of visual cues with architectural materials that give people a vocabulary for the public spaces.”

This idea can be seen in features such as strong floor graphics at every elevator lobby and signature porcelain tile that leads visitors from the first-floor lobby to the elevators and up through the fourth floor.

The facility will improve efficiency and access to justice by combining civil, family, probate, family support and family law into one facility, says Teresa Ruano, communications specialist for the owner.

Moore says that because the courthouse was built to mid-1960’s standards, it had unusually low ceiling heights. “A normal courthouse today has a 15- to 17-ft floor-to-floor height, but this building was difficult because I had to work around a 12-ft 6-in floor height,” he says.

Turner’s Owens says a modern courthouse building needs “quite a bit” of ceiling space for air-delivery systems, and this project offered little.

“We had to deal with the problem in the most effective way that we knew and that was to use BIM,” Owens says. “So we took David’s drawings and converted them into 3-D and then we modeled the entire project, while working closely with the design team.”

Once the project was modeled, he says crews were able to work the air and mechanical systems around the perimeters of the courtrooms instead of directly overhead.

Owens says BIM also assisted in seismic upgrading on the fifth floor. He says that in this area, the structural engineer selected a carbon fiber enclosure to seismically upgrade the columns. “This stuff replaces the steel-jacketed column wraps that are seen on highway bridges and things of that nature,” he adds.

He says crews used the wrap on about 28 columns on the top floor, and the rest of the building was reinforced with concrete in-fills in various existing openings, such as stairways, duct openings and shear walls.

The Sisk building was vacated in 2005 when the Robert E. Coyle United States Courthouse was dedicated. The federal government then agreed to convey title for $1 for use by the Superior Court with the stipulation that the building be used for the administration of justice.

If you could perfectly illustrate a traffic bottleneck, just take a look at downtown Lincoln on a busy evening commute. At two lanes, State Route 65 runs through the city, oftentimes at a pace slower than a crawl in this city of 42,126.

To make matters worse, 7% of the vehicles that travel the route are trucks and almost half of those are five-axle vehicles or larger.

The need for a new section of SR 65 around the city has been on Caltrans’ wish-list for some time, ever since Forbes.com listed Lincoln as the nation’s fastest growing city from 2000 to 2006 with an increase of 238.6% in population. This growth is due to Lincoln being located in the rapid suburban development north of Sacramento, in Placer County.

And though homebuilding in Lincoln and environs has obviously quieted down with the lumbering economy, the downtown bottleneck has not.

In August 2008, Caltrans and its joint venture general contractor DeSilva Gates/Flatiron West Inc. broke ground on the $325 million Lincoln Bypass project, which will create an 11.7-mi bypass around the city. The project received $162.9 million in Proposition 1B funds, the $19.9 billion transportation bond approved by voters in 2006. Other funding is coming from the city, Placer County, the South Placer Regional Transportation Authority and the federal government.

B.F. Sisk administrative offices.

The northern segment of State Route 65 begins at the interchange with Interstate 80 in Roseville as a freeway heading northwest to Blue Oaks Boulevard where the freeway turns north towards Lincoln. The freeway currently ends south of the Sunset Boulevard intersection in Rocklin where the highway continues as a four-lane expressway. The highway is then reduced to roughly two lanes as it enters downtown Lincoln. The highway heads northwest again outside of Lincoln as a rural two-lane highway, passing through the communities of Sheridan and Wheatland. It assumes its freeway designation a few miles north of Wheatland, ending at State Route 70 in Olivehurst.

The Lincoln Bypass project will entail two phases -- Phase 1 includes adding four lanes for the bypass between Industrial Avenue and Nelson Lane, and two lanes further north to the town of Sheridan; and Phase 2 includes adding two additional lanes between Nelson Lane and the town of Sheridan, and adding interchanges.

Sam Jordan, P.E., Caltrans project manager, says that the existing facility through Lincoln is a “Main Street” highway, which will not serve the ultimate transportation needs of the region.

“Due primarily to congestion, the collision rate in downtown Lincoln is higher than the statewide average rate for this type of facility,” he says. “The purpose of the project is to relive congestion and improve safety on existing State Route 65 in the vicinity of the city of Lincoln and provide for a regional traffic solution to accommodate projected traffic volumes for the year 2025.”

Jordan says the bottlenecks in the city are exasperated by “flooding issues,” as well as a number of signalized intersections and at-grade railroad crossings.

One of the main elements of the project is the construction of 17 bridges, all of which will be built on site.

15 new courtrooms are included in the project.

Jordan says the bypass goes through “developed, undeveloped and farm land areas.” It crosses, in order, Industrial Boulevard/Union Pacific Railroad, South Ingram Slough, Ferrari Ranch Road, North Ingram Slough, Auburn Ravine, Markham Ravine, Nicolaus Road Overcrossing, Lincoln Airport Creek, Coon Creek, North Farm Overcrossing, South Yankee Slough, North Yankee Slough and Big Yankee Slough.

The project will also include six soundwalls, a partial interchange at Industrial Boulevard and a full interchange at Ferrari Ranch Road, and three at-grade intersections at Nelson Lane, Wise Road and Riosa Road.

Construction is scheduled to be completed in fall 2012.

Earlier this year, there were discussions in the capitol about freezing a number of budgets for a number of statewide highway projects, due to the financial meltdown nationally and the state’s inability to pass an annual budget.

Jordan says that although the Lincoln Bypass project was considered in the freeze, “We got lucky and dodged the bullet.

“The state budget challenge did not impact this project because Prop 1B and local funds continued to carry the project.”

Overally, Jordan says the project is moving ahead swimmingly.

“We are very fortunate to have excellent staff administering this project and also a good contractor to work with,” he says. “It’s a continuous team effort between Caltrans employees and management and the GC’s employees and management. We have plans for everything -- communication, emergency, contingency. Our field personnel meet with the contractors daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly in an effort to stay on top of things and to insure safe and smooth operations.”