$133M green overhaul will ripple through Portland

Nine months after the federal government announced a planned $133 million rehabilitation of Portland’s Edith Green-Wendall Wyatt Federal Building, the project is about to start stimulating the local economy.

In December, the U.S. General Services Administration selected Howard S. Wright Cos. to manage the controversial renovation.

In doing so, it signaled its intent to hire the company for the more lucrative job of serving as general contractor for the job once an acceptable construction budget could be worked out.

The project, slated to start in late 2010, will drizzle dollars throughout Portland, not only for construction but for other new business as well.

More than 1,000 federal workers will move to temporary quarters during the project, which means business for local landlords, moving companies and office suppliers.

Subcontractors will get a bump in business, as will local coffee shops and businesses patronized by the project’s workers.

The massive project means new jobs for a particularly battered segment of Oregon’s economy: construction workers. There were only 75,200 construction jobs in Oregon in November, the lowest level since December 1995.

“Obviously it’s a very exciting project for us,” said Brad Nydahl, CEO of Howard S. Wright Cos., which has corporate offices in Seattle and in metro Portland.

Nydahl said the GSA directed contractors not to elaborate on stimulus-funded projects.

But he confirmed the project will help Howard S. Wright at a time when few new construction projects are getting funded. Little new work is expected before 2011 at the earliest.

The Edith Green-Wendall Wyatt rehabilitation, at 1220 S.W. Third Ave., involves a total renovation to the 18-story, 516,360-square-foot office building and parking garage.

The federal government is hunting for at least 200,000 square feet of office space in downtown Portland to accommodate the 1,200 federal workers who will be displaced by the project for 30 to 40 months. No lease has been signed, but office vacancy rates in the greater downtown area exceeded 11 percent at the end of October.

Sera Architects of Portland and Cutler Anderson Architects of Bainbridge Island, Wash., also stand to benefit. The two are teaming to design an update that meets federal goals for energy and water savings.

The federal government is pursuing the U.S. Green Building Council’s highest green rating for the project. It intends to use it as an example of how older inefficient office towers can be modernized. Elements include new seismic bracing, new mechanical systems, new energy-efficient cladding that includes vegetated fins on the western side, a green roof, a system to capture rainwater for use in toilets, rooftop solar panels and advanced lighting systems that control for daylight. And, being a federal building, the project will add new systems to control access to the building and protect it against blasts.

Other beneficiaries include subcontractors.

Constructed in 1974, Edith Green-Wendall Wyatt was slated for a renovation after a 2001 survey of federal installations. The project was shelved for lack of funding but revived in 2009 and included in the $787 billion American Recovery and Reconstruction Act.

It isn’t Howard S. Wright’s first effort to modernize a federal office building.

In 2009, it completed a similar rehabilitation of Seattle’s Henry M. Jackson Federal Building, a 37-story office tower that like Edith Green-Wendall Wyatt, was constructed in the mid-1970s.

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