Tempe Turns Green for New Bus Facility

By Scott Blair

Tempe is submitting the East Valley Bus Maintenance Facility, scheduled to be completed this month, for LEED gold and silver certification.

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When officials from Scottsdale, Tempe and Valley Metro decided to construct a joint maintenance and operations facility, choosing a sustainable design came naturally to them.

“Transit is a green system and our buses use alternative fuel, so this facility goes with that theme,” says Robert Yabes, principal planner with the Tempe Transportation Planning & Transit Division.

Located on a 25-acre site in Tempe, the $46.8 million facility includes a 19,650-sq-ft administration building, a 74,400-sq-ft maintenance building, a 7,100-sq-ft bus washing and fueling station and a bus parking area.

The administration building will be submitted for LEED gold certification, while the rest of the site will be LEED silver, says Ken Anderson, senior associate with Denver-based RNL, the architect of the project.

The office building will feature under-floor air distribution, which is not only more sustainable but also eliminates most of the ductwork and allows more flexibility in office configuration to the users, Anderson says.

The administration building is located at the front of the property and features contemporary metal panels, fabric canopies and a curved metal roof. “We wanted to make it pleasing, high profile and transit-friendly,” says R.C. Noderer, transit operation technician with the city of Tempe. “We made no attempt to hide it.”

The maintenance facility features 19 working bays, some with lower levels. The structural concrete tilt-up panels utilize up to 18% fly ash to help attain the recycled content points for LEED. “We actually would have used more fly ash, but the availability was short,” says Tom Harmeyer, project superintendent with Phoenix-based D.L. Withers Construction, the project’s construction manager-at-risk.

One innovative feature helps to significantly reduce the use of water in the washing station, where each of the 250 buses need to be washed at least once every four days. “The system that we used here reclaims 80% of the water used to wash the buses, which is filtered and then reused again to wash the next bus,” Anderson says.

Other green features include highly-reflective roofing membranes, clerestory windows for day-lighting, sensor-activated lighting and the use of evaporative cooling.

Some of the most effective energy-saving solutions are also the simplest to achieve. Instead of storing all of the parked buses in the open sun, half will be covered by shade canopies. “Otherwise it would take about an hour to cool down a bus that has been sitting in the direct sun,” Yabes says, with the bus running and consuming fuel that whole time.

The fueling station will provide liquefied and compressed natural gas, both alternative fuels, for the fleet of buses. Evanston, Wyo.-based NorthStar designed and built the specialized systems due to the complexity of the highly pressurized and super-cooled fuel.

Soil conditions at the site were not ideal due to the proximity to the Salt River bed and pre-existing construction waste that had been dumped there. “We over-excavated the whole 25-acre site to a minimum of 5 ft up to 14 ft in some places,” Harmeyer says. “We crushed 11,000 cu yds of the concrete rubble that we dug up onsite. We were able to re-use it as backfill material and saved money while diverting it from landfills.”

In total, 217,000 cu yds of material was excavated for the project. 

Key Players

Architect: RNL
CM at Risk: D.L. Withers Construction
Construction Management: Kitchell CEM
Subcontractors: Echo Canyon Electric; Rummel Construction; Suntec Concrete; Tpac; Skyline Steel; Masseur Plumbing; Midstate Mechanical

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