By: scott.huish//December 14, 2020//
scott.huish//December 14, 2020//

Location: PortlandPublic-private development partnerships are certainly more complex than your average building project.
That was certainly the case with the long-awaited Hyatt Regency Portland At The Oregon Convention Center, which featured a partnership between Oregon Metro, Prosper Portland, general contractor Mortenson Construction, architecture firm ESG Architecture and Design and many others, including a wide range of financial backers.
It took fully seven years from the time the first request for proposals were sent out by Metro in 2012 until the project reached substantial completion in December 2019. But the results were well worth the wait and have given Portland a hospitality centerpiece it can base future events around.
鈥淲e鈥檙e really proud of the development in delivering not just a construction project,鈥 said Pat Clemons, a senior project manager with Mortenson, which employed a design-build delivery method and also served as project developer. 鈥淚t went from a vacant lot, assembling the properties, assembling the design, getting the project permitted, the stakeholders approval, working with Hyatt as a partner, working with Metro, the many sources of funding and the support it took politically. It was a vast number of stakeholders that had to be united, and being able to do that is something to be proud of.鈥
The new 14-story hotel features more than 440,000 square feet of floor space and over 600 guest rooms. There is more than 35,000 square feet of meeting and event space, a full service restaurant and bar, administrative office space, and retail space that includes a market and a coffee shop. The hotel is designed to LEED Gold standards and the partnership between Hyatt and Metro, which runs the convention center, was starting to pay decided dividends prior to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic earlier this year.
For Minneapolis-based Mortenson, the project not only cemented their place in the Portland market, it delivered a huge benefit to Portland in the form of economic development, created thousands of new jobs, both in construction and beyond, and advanced diversity, equity and inclusion in the trades along the way.
Adding to the complexity was the simultaneous construction of a parking garage on the west end of the property that has over 175,000 square feet of parking, as well as the ability to be expanded in the future to host 120,000 square feet of additional office space on top of the garage. It was a veritable tightrope walk of project management and development and the whole team involved pulled it off on time and on budget.
鈥淢ortenson has been on time, on budget and has delivered zero surprises throughout construction,鈥 said Scott Cruikshank, general manager of Metro.
鈥淚n my opinion, given the circumstances and challenges, this was the most successful public-private partnership in my time at PDC (Prosper Portland),鈥 said Bruce Wood, former real estate manager for Prosper Portland.