The California state government has launched a historic building boom in Sacramento, scheduling roughly $3.4 billion worth of new construction and renovations over the next five years with more to follow, The Sacramento Bee reports.
The spending is expected to be more than $4 billion, when additional plans for new towers for the state’s pension funds are considered.
The department is using the design-build model, rather than the more traditional process of contracting separately with a designer and then a builder. Kenney said the new process is roughly 12 months faster on average.
“Something like this — this amount of square footage, this amount of resources, this amount of comprehensive refresh — I think is unprecedented,” the newspaper quoted Jason Kenney as saying. Kenney is overseeing most of the projects as deputy director of the Department of General Services’ (DGS) Real Estate Division.
The new buildings will allow DGS to move employees out of some of the state’s oldest Sacramento offices — one dates to 1929 — and start renovating. Once each office is renovated, employees can move in from another old office, freeing up another building for renovation in a process Kenney likened to “a giant domino game.”
As an example of the projects under-way, the state government’s new 21-story natural resources building has a $520 million price tag. AC Martin/Turner is building the structure.
Contractors have started building three new state offices downtown with a combined price tag of $1.2 billion. Demolition could begin as early as fall for a state-owned building on Richards Boulevard in North Sacramento to make way for a $915 million campus, the newspaper reports.
Three renovations of old state offices will follow, with a combined price of about $513 million. The state Legislature is working separately from DGS on a $755 million tear-down and rebuild of the 67-year-old Capitol Annex used by legislative and executive officers that has an expected finish date of 2025.An 11-story, $274 million building at 1215 O St. should be finished at the end of next year, Kenney said.
The 10-year DGS plan calls for more renovations that haven’t yet received funding, ultimately including 11 buildings. The department’s schedule calls for each of the projects to be completed four to five years after construction starts, a timeline the Legislative Analyst’s Office called “ambitious.”
“This timeline is significantly faster than other state building projects,” the office said in an analysis. “While DGS has not initiated the construction or major renovation of any state office buildings over the past ten years, it has generally taken the department at least six years to complete new state office building and major renovation projects in recent decades.”
The buildings will meet “zero net energy” targets, including being powered exclusively with solar power through an agreement with SMUD, Kenney said. At present, about 25 percent of the square footage of DGS buildings meet the renewable energy targets, he said.
The buildings will also reduce the state’s water usage by treating and reusing “gray” water for air conditioning and other non-potable uses, he said.
