The team proposing a core-and-shell renovation of the historic Multnomah County Courthouse still has hurdles to cross before it can gain the Portland Historic Landmarks Commission‘s approval.

Historic landmarks commissioners and city staff discussed the project at a three-hour hearing on Monday. They related concerns with transportation impacts and loading on Southwest Salmon Street, removal of some historic materials from the building and changes to lighting, and the placement and size of doors and windows.

GBD Architects is charged with designing a conversion of the full-block brick masonry building completed in 1914 into a modern office space for Portland-based NBP Capital. The 300,000-square-foot courthouse, at 1021 S.W. Fourth Ave., once housed prisoners and is familiar to many Portlanders who have paid traffic tickets and settled legal matters there for generations.

The building on the downtown Park Blocks is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, so proposed changes must also win approval from the National Park Service and State Historic Preservation Office to secure needed tax credits.

NBP Capital purchased the courthouse from the county in November 2018 for $28 million. After considering a hotel use, NBP has opted to bet on Portland’s rapidly expanding office market as tech firms jockey to lease attractive urban workplaces.

Traffic impacts loom large for the proposal. GBD is engaged in ongoing discussions with the Portland Bureau of Transportation regarding loading from Salmon Street and related issues.

“We were hoping we’d be able to come in here with the transportation things resolved,” said Agustin Enriquez, a GBD design director. “We’re not quite there yet.”

A PBOT representative said the agency needs more information from the project team.

“We don’t know much about the proposal yet,” PBOT’s Tammy Borden-King said.

As designed, trucks would back into the building’s single loading area, at times blocking both traffic lanes on Salmon Street. PBOT requested the applicant consider moving the loading to Southwest Main Street on the building’s south elevation.

“We asked them to study both,” Borden-King said. “They declined to do that; they only studied Salmon.”

The loading is needed to supply a ground-floor restaurant, and to provide trash and recycling services, Enriquez said.

GBD has abandoned plans for parking at the building.

The building’s central courtyard – sort of a donut hole in the center of the square exterior – will enable a contractor to perform a seismic upgrade with minimal disturbance to the structure, Enriquez said.

“We don’t have to remove a lot of material in the center of the building to seismically upgrade a very heavy masonry building,” he said. “That allows the building to be upgraded without really having to gut the inside.”

GBD proposes to convert old jail cells on the penthouse level into transparent office space with substantial window coverage. That portion of the existing structure is made of hollow clay tile. That material is not historically important, commissioners said, adding they were open to granting more leeway at the penthouse level.

Chairwoman Kristen Minor said the height of the penthouse level could be an issue for pedestrians and observers from other downtown buildings.

“I have a little concern that now we’re creating a wedding cake,” she said.

The project previously came before the Historic Landmarks Commission for a design advice hearing on Sept. 9, 2019, and a land use review hearing on Oct. 25, 2019. The project is tentatively scheduled to return on March 23.

Enriquez said the project team should be able to satisfy the commission’s objections.

“I think we could solve all these things,” he said.

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GBD Architects‘ plans for a thorough core and shell renovation of the historic Multnomah County Courthouse may not be able to include punching new vehicle access points into the building.

The project team plans to convert the seven-story building into primarily office space, with some retail use – possibly a restaurant – on the ground floor. But plans require approval from the Historic Landmarks Commission, which offered its initial design advice at a hearing on Monday.

GBD is designing the project on behalf of NBP Capital. The Portland developer purchased the 275,000-square-foot courthouse from the county in November 2018 for $28 million. An early plan for adaptive reuse has gone by the wayside.

“A hotel is no longer planned,” said Agustin Enriquez, a GBD Architects principal who is leading the design team.

The courthouse, located between Salmon and Main streets and Fourth and Fifth avenues, was built in two phases, in 1909 and 1914, with a design by Whidden and Lewis, according to a Bureau of Development Services staff report. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

Commissioners were generally complimentary of GBD’s plans, but expressed reservations about some proposed changes to the structure – most notably two new vehicle entrances that would require curb cuts.

“I have some real problems with creating these new vehicular access points,” Commission Chairwoman Kristen Minor said. “I’m concerned with changing buildings enough so they can be used – that’s how we keep old buildings – but I am equally concerned with creating a poor pedestrian environment.”

Architects said the building will need vehicle access points for loading, including for the potential ground-floor restaurant. The entries are proposed along Salmon Street on the north elevation.

Ashley Koger, a GBD senior associate, pointed to other historic Portland buildings with modern curb cuts, including the Galleria Building, which has vehicle access along Alder Street for Target loading, and the former Meier and Frank Delivery Depot building that is now leased by Vestas. However, Minor was not persuaded.

“I am not convinced that you need vehicle access,” she said.

Seeking common ground, Minor floated the possibility of approving one, narrow vehicle entrance. Koger said the Portland Bureau of Transportation would be unlikely to approve a vehicle entrance narrower than about 20 feet. That was too sizable for the commissioners.

“I don’t think I’d be able to support a 20-foot-wide opening on this building,” Minor said. “It would stick out like a sore thumb.”

Commissioner Andrew Smith agreed.

“It’s hard to imagine how it would get done successfully, so I sort of echo that,” he said.

GBD Architects plans to add numerous windows to the penthouse that was once a jail.

“There’s not many windows on the top floor,” Enriquez said.

A 10-foot parapet that blocked prisoners’ views of freedom has been largely removed, but a portion remains.

“It was originally meant to be for prisoners, and we want it to be a great home for office workers for 100 years or more,” Koger said.

No additional height is being requested; the building will remain at 113 feet, 9 inches.

The project team is requesting to build new entrances. A sealed pedestrian entrance along Fifth Avenue would be reintroduced. Also, on the south elevation facing Main Street, an entrance would be built where a Sheriff’s Office entryway once stood.

“We are super excited to be working on this project,” Enriquez said. “It’s one of the few full-block national landmarks in the city. There are others, but not a lot of them.”

While GBD is working on the historic courthouse, the new, $324.5 million Multnomah County Central Courthouse is under construction near the west end of the Hawthorne Bridge. Hoffman Construction is serving as the general contractor; SRG Partnership provided the design. The 17-story building is slated to open midsummer 2020.

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Hoffman Construction is seeking bids from subcontractors for bid package No. 13 (exterior improvements) for the Multnomah County Central Courthouse project.

The scope of work is for site improvements and includes concrete, metals, furnishings and exterior improvement CSI divisions. It’s all part of the county’s new 17-story courthouse being built near the Hawthorne Bridge’s west end, at Southwest First Avenue and Madison Street, in downtown Portland.

Ground was broken on the courthouse in 2016, which is being built to connect to the historic Jefferson Station building. With a projected cost of $324.5 million, it is one of the largest projects under construction in Portland.

The new facility is scheduled to open at some point in 2020.

Construction of the existing Multnomah County Courthouse finished in 1914. That building, at 1021 S.W. Fourth Ave., was sold last year to NBP Capital for $28 million.

To learn more about the bid package, send an email to Justin Paterson at justin-paterson@hoffmancorp.com. All bids must be submitted before 2 p.m. on Feb. 21.

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The $315 million Multnomah County Courthouse project being undertaken by general contractor Hoffman Construction was given a recent burst of color in the form of an elaborate mural adorning one of the job site’s pedestrian walkways. Featuring 86 separate portraits representing jurors awaiting their duty in a courtroom, the mural was designed and carried out by students and staff at Portland’s King School Museum of Contemporary Art. Led by artist Ralph Pugay, the project was dedicated last Thursday during a brief ceremony inside the pedestrian tunnel. In this short video, Pugay explains the design and theme behind the mural. And check the 91��Ƶ on Friday, May 18, for the complete story and additional photos of the project in the actual print version of our paper.

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The new Multnomah County Courthouse project is steadily climbing, floor by floor, as general contractor Hoffman Construction works on the planned $315 million, 17-story replacement for the existing courthouse on Southwest Fourth Avenue.

Hoffman recently hosted a tour of the construction site as part of the workforce development event Industry for a Day, which has been held the past three years by nonprofit group All Hands Raised. Below, a short video will give you a quick look inside the project.

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Among Oregon counties hoping for state money to help pay for new courthouse construction, Multnomah County is sitting in an enviable position.

Multnomah was one of the first counties recommended to receive money made available in 2013 through the passage of Senate Bill 5506; it created a program offering 50 percent matching bond grants for counties looking to replace aging courthouses with new structures. But before Multnomah County courthouse construction can begin, steps must be taken.

The project is slated to go before the Portland Design Commission for advice during the group’s Thursday session. The commission has set aside approximately two hours to speak with designers, who will then use feedback to prepare the project for formal design review.

Even as architects refine the courthouse design, the county will work to drum up its share of money to pay for the new courthouse. Originally, it was expected to cost $250 million. The state entered an agreement to provide $125 million for the project.

The county has since decided to move additional offices into the new courthouse, which will bump up the project cost to $300 million, county spokesman Mike Pullen said. The state, however, is holding firm on the amount it agreed to provide, so the county now will have to raise $175 million for the project.

The state Legislature earlier this year agreed to let counties raise money for new courthouse projects by adding a $5 surcharge to traffic and parking violations. In order to set up the surcharge, it must be approved by the county circuit court presiding judge and then be approved by the Oregon chief justice and chief court administrator. Multnomah County has taken steps to get that approval and hopes to implement the surcharge in 2017, Pullen said.

The county also is moving to build a pool of firms and labor (with an emphasis on minorities and women for the latter) for the courthouse construction, even though ground isn’t expected to be broken for at least another year.

The flurry of private and public construction in Portland has increased the difficulty of finding sufficient tradespeople, especially women and minorities. For the county’s Sellwood Bridge project, for example, the county and the project contractor were able to hit goals for firms certified as minority-owned, women-owned and emerging small businesses as well for minority journey workers and apprentice representation in the labor pool. But the project team came up short of its goal for women journey workers and apprentices in the labor pool, Pullen said.

To try to avoid a similar problem with the courthouse, Multnomah County and the project team recently held an informational meeting to begin connecting with minority- and women-owned firms and emerging small businesses. The county and the project team also are working with Constructing Hope, Oregon Tradeswomen and similar groups to begin building a workforce of journey workers and apprentices for the project.

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For years, attorneys and judges struggled to gain the ears of county officials and state legislators to alert them to the security and seismic risks inherent in outdated county courthouses across the state.

In 2013, those efforts paid off when the Oregon Legislature created programs to provide money matches for construction of new courthouses as well as for short-term improvements for existing ones.

If there was any question whether counties would actually take the issue seriously, those doubts have been laid to rest. With more requests than money available during any one biennium, a group handed the task of bringing together counties to prioritize their needs for new courthouse buildings is preparing to send its latest list of recommended projects to Oregon’s chief justice for inclusion in the state judicial department’s budget for the next biennium.

But the existence of matching grant money doesn’t mean that the conditions of crumbling county courthouses from Tillamook to Wasco are improving overnight.

For counties that came to the table hoping to walk away with money to begin construction, the experience has been a valuable lesson in the importance of performing adequate preparation and pre-planning. For other counties, it’s been a reminder that being among the state’s most populous ones is no guarantee of an automatic move to the head of the pack.

Picking and choosing

Right now, the matching grant money is a promise, not a guarantee – and there’s only so much available during each biennium. That means projects have to be prioritized, and that’s where the Association of Oregon Counties comes into the picture. At the request of legislators, the AOC agreed to organize and coordinate a group called the Court Facilities Task Force to work with counties and recommend projects to receive money through the replacement and improvement programs.

The recommendation process for both courthouse replacement and improvement projects is based on a model that has proven successful for community college projects, said Patrick Sieng, the AOC’s public safety policy manager.

Community colleges formerly approached the Legislature individually to ask for money to pay for projects. Eventually, legislators required the colleges to work together to share information about their needs, with an eye toward creating a prioritized list that could be used to determine which projects would receive state money for a given budgetary period.

The system works so well that ports also have begun using the approach, Sieng said.

The task force members, many of whom come from counties that either have asked or will ask for state money matches for courthouse projects, understand what’s at stake for officials who come to them seeking money.

“It’s extremely hard,” said Mark Labhart, a Tillamook County commissioner who served on the task force after his county received a matching grant for a new court annex. “I have a lot of friends throughout the state, but we had some very clear criteria. We looked at the list, at which are the worst (courthouses) in the state.”

Plans and strategies

In the approximately two years since the task force was formed, the prioritization approach appears to be serving its intended purpose. Task force-organized meetings, which allow counties to come together to discuss their needs, are helping officials better plan and strategize how and when they’ll submit their requests for different phases of their projects.

The task force’s short list is just a recommendation, however. The most recent list, for example, will be presented to the AOC’s Legislative Task Force in early May. Projects approved by that task force will then be forwarded to Oregon Chief Justice Thomas Balmer, who has the option to include some, all or none of the recommended projects in his 2017-19 recommended budget for the state’s judicial department. But that doesn’t assure clear sailing for any of the counties whose projects end up in the chief justice’s recommended budget.

During the 2015 legislative session, for example, Lane County’s request for $1.4 million from the matching bond program earned a slot on Balmer’s recommended budget for the 2105-17 biennium. But Lane County walked away empty-handed when the Legislature cut the project from the judicial department’s final budget. The county has since received a promise from the state for a $1.4 million matching grant to allow the design phase to start for a new courthouse.

Counties looking for state matches to help pay for new courthouses also have to worry about how they’ll raise their share of project costs. The state grant program will only cover up to 50 percent of those costs.

That’s where Tillamook County commissioners find themselves. In 2008, a study by the Oregon Judicial Department determined that the Tillamook County Courthouse was the fourth-worst facility in the state in regard to problems ranging from security issues to structural deficiencies. Rather than try to build a new courthouse, the county decided to build a court annex that will house two circuit courts as well as offices for the county district attorney and departments such as parole and probation. The state has entered an agreement with Tillamook County to provide half of the money for the estimated $14 million project, but the county has yet to figure out where it will find the remaining $7 million.

During the 2016 session, the Legislature voted to allow presiding judges of judicial districts looking to use the state’s matching money to build new courthouses permission to add a $5 surcharge to fees related to traffic and parking violations. Counties will be able to use money from the surcharge to help cover their share of project costs. Multnomah County, for example, plans to use the surcharge starting in 2017 to pay for its new courthouse, spokesman Mike Pullen said.

Tillamook County, however, has decided it won’t tap into the surcharge, Labhart said. He also doesn’t want to have to place a construction bond measure in front of Tillamook County residents.

“I don’t think voters will support it,” he said.

Even as Labhart and other county officials try to find alternative funding sources, the clock is ticking. The county is preparing to select an architect to start the design phase of the annex project, and construction is tentatively scheduled to start in 2017.

Labhart is determined to see the project through to completion.

“We made the commitment,” he said. “We’re going to find the money.”

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Multnomah County will hold subcontractor outreach events regarding upcoming transportation work and two large public projects.

Hoffman Construction recently won the bid to be general contractor of the $300 million Multnomah County Central Courthouse project. JE Dunn was awarded the $85 million-$95 million county Health Department headquarters project.

Officials will provide information about subcontracting opportunities for both projects, from 3:30 to 5 p.m. March 29 in the first floor boardroom of the Multnomah Building, 501 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd.

Both Hoffman and JE Dunn will act as construction manager-general contractors on the projects, which are both early in the design phase. Construction on both is expected to begin next year. Both project teams are looking for state-certified minority-owned, woman-owned and emerging small businesses, according to a county news release.

In addition, the county’s Transportation Division will hold an outreach event to inform contractors about locally- and federally-funded road projects that will be bid this year, from 7:30 to 11:30 a.m. April 8 in the first floor boardroom of the Multnomah Building, 501 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd.

Also, a survey is available online asking contractors how they locate information about contracting opportunities. The will close on March 30.

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Multnomah County is looking for subcontractors for the upcoming $250 million Central Courthouse project.

The project team on Friday will hold an outreach event from 9 a.m. to noon at Oregon Association of Minority Entrepreneurs‘ office, at 731 N. Hayden Meadows Drive. Officials representing the county, design firm SRG Partnership and general contractor Hoffman Construction will be present.

The project was launched in 2013 and is in the design phase. Structural problems with the century-old courthouse building, located at 1021 S.W. Fourth Ave., helped kick-start the replacement effort. The facility’s unreinforced masonry walls do not meet current seismic codes, according to the county. Another issue is inadequate lobby space, which regularly leads to long lines extending outside of the building.

Construction is scheduled to begin in 2017, with a functional courthouse expected to open by 2020. The building will be constructed on county-owned land at either the Hawthorne bridgehead south site block (the county’s preference), or Block 128 between KOIN Tower and a Marriott hotel.

The future of the current building is uncertain. It’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places and its demolition has drawn opposition from preservationists.

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The Multnomah County Central Courthouse project is hosting an open house from 4 to 5:30 p.m. Monday, Aug. 31 for minority-owned, women-owned and emerging small businesses.

The event, which will be held in the board room of the Multnomah Building at 503 S.E. Hawthorne St., will offer an opportunity for architectural, engineering, professional services, public involvement and training firms to learn about the estimated $250 million Multnomah County Central Courthouse project and discuss project opportunities.

Multnomah County is the lead agency for the Central Courthouse project. A team led by SRG Partnership was selected for architecture and engineering services. Hoffman Construction was selected for the Construction Manager/General Contractor contract.

During the design phase of the project, the county and SRG will actively recruit small businesses and will provide workshop and mentorship opportunities for minority-owned, women-owned and emerging small business. Similar outreach also will occur during the construction phase of the project.

Project opportunities include architectural design, interior design, historic preservation, landscape architecture, training and facilitation, public involvement, ADA compliance, specialty consultants, and subcontracting.

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