Filling the Spaces

Los Angeles Trade-Tech College goes with design-build parking project

By Greg Aragon

The first ever design-build project in the nine-campus Los Angeles Community College District is going up at Los Angeles Trade-Tech College.

Costing $12 million, the 805-stall Olive Street Parking Garage is being built by Lake Forest-based ARB Inc. Construction management operations are being overseen by a joint venture of New York-based DMJM (Daniel, Mann, Johnson, & Mendenhall) and Los Angeles-based JGM (Jenkins Gales & Martinez, Inc.).

Choate Parking Consultants of Irvine provided design services for ARB.

"There was a definite need for this project," said Bill Gasper, senior administrative analyst with Trade Tech. "Parking is very tight on-campus and we need between 1,400 and 1,500 spaces to keep meet the demand. So this new lot will just barely meet that goal."

Los Angeles Trade-Tech is a two-year college with an average enrollment of about 1,400 students per semester.

Gasper said the school currently has 1,080 parking spaces distributed in and around campus, with 500 underneath the 10 Freeway, 250 at a church, 250 at an abandoned hospital, 400 on top of its automotive building, 65 on a portion of its basketball courts, 100 for staff and 15 metered on campus. He said that students who cannot find a spot on campus must park an average of two blocks away.

Aside from bringing new parking spaces to the campus, the project is also giving the school and the district its first look at the design-build method.

"What's most interesting about this project is that it is a design-build," said Thomas T. Lynch, senior construction manager with JGM. "The benefits of this are an accelerated schedule, dollar savings, a single point of procurement, and less confrontation between parties."

Darwin Sen, ARB project manager, agrees. He said design-build will save the district about $2.5 million and about one year in time, as opposed to going with the traditional design-bid-build method.

Lynch said that by dealing directly with the design-builder "as one entity rather than having to be the coordinator between two separate entities," gives the college a greater look into the inner workings of the project. "And the dropdown benefit of that is less confrontation and less issues between all parties," he added.

The 250,000-sq.-ft. garage is located on the eastern side of the 25-acre campus, between Grand Ave. and Olive Street in Los Angeles. Room for the project's 63,000-sq.-ft. site was made by demolishing the school's old child development building. A new $6 million child center is currently being constructed on an adjacent lot.

Construction on the five-level garage began in May of 2005 and is scheduled to be complete in May of this year. Construction is currently about 60 percent complete, with work on the third level wrapping up this month.

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