Portland-based GreenWorks recently received national recognition for its contribution to the cleanup and redevelopment of a 33-acre brownfield in the South Waterfront District.

GreenWorks received from the American Society of Landscape Architects a 2014 Honor Award in the analysis and planning category for work on Zidell Marine Corp. property redevelopment completed in 2011. The award was among those given out by ASLA that honor top commercial, residential, institutional, planning, communications and research projects by landscape architects from across the U.S.

GreenWorks staffers developed a series of green stormwater management options for the redevelopment, principal Mike Faha said. The strategy avoided the challenges of installing pipes for managing stormwater on a brownfield.

The planning effort involved conceiving a network of “green stormwater solutions diffused throughout the site,” including bio-swales, eco-roofs and porous paving, Faha said.

“GreenWorks led the visioning process,” he said.

The Zidell site and adjacent river sediment had become contaminated from 100 years of continuous industrial use. The property owner, ZRZ Realty, in partnership with the city of Portland, received a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the cleanup.

The post GreenWorks draws national award for cleanup work appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Vancouver, Wash.-based environmental engineering and planning firm Maul Foster & Alongi has received national recognition for its part in the cleanup and redevelopment of a 32-acre brownfield in Portland’s South Waterfront District.

The Coasts, Oceans, Ports and Rivers Institute awarded the firm a 2014 Project Excellence Award in the large project category for the Zidell Marine Corp. property cleanup completed in 2011.

The award is one of two given out annually by COPRI, a semi-autonomous institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Maul Foster & Alongi President Jim Maul said it was an honor for the firm to earn the sole large project award.

“It really is a pretty significant acknowledgement,” he said.

Firm staffers worked closely with the Zidell Marine Corp. property owners and other project team members to restore the contaminated site without disrupting its ongoing use as a barge construction facility. During the cleanup, nearly 20,000 cubic yards of soil contaminated with industrial chemicals was removed from the riverbank in coordination with Tilikum Crossing transit bridge construction nearby.

Maul Foster & Alongi staffers also helped design an 11-acre cap to prevent hazardous chemicals from leaching into the Willamette River, Maul said. The award judges were impressed by the firm’s integration of science and engineering for the project, he said.

“There was a lot of science and complex modeling that was incorporated into the design of the cap,” he said.

The post Northwest firm’s cleanup work receives national recognition appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Maul Foster & Alongi President Jim Maul has seen what he describes as a paradigm shift in the forces driving brownfield cleanups in the Portland-metro region.

“People began to realize if they were going to go in and cap a site, it could be a parking lot or a building,” he said, “so we started looking at the economics of the cleanup.”

Maul, a co-founder of the Vancouver, Wash.-based environmental engineering and planning firm, said specialization in assessment of redevelopment potential of sites contaminated by past industrial use has paid off. As the economy rebounds and the demand for urban infill grows, firm staffers are seeing an increase in private efforts to clean up and develop brownfield sites.

“We were hearing from a lot of our clients that there was a real demand for land-use planning,” Maul said. “We realized we were a very competent brownfield company … We came at it both from the technical end and the policy side.”

Maul Foster & Alongi’s experience with prominent cleanups like the Zidell Marine Corp. property in the South Waterfront District has led to recent work on brownfield inventories for Metro and the cities of Portland and Beaverton. The goal behind the inventories is to encourage public-private partnerships to clean up and breathe new life into the region’s brownfields, including old mills and former gas stations and auto shops, Maul said.

“Today, the majority of cleanups are driven by market forces,” he said.

Brownfield inventory work involves investigating which contaminated sites have the greatest potential for redevelopment and most community interest. City officials can then reach out to property owners to find out what would be required for cleanup and redevelopment to take place.

“To me, it’s a little bit like a public works project,” Maul said. “Development is the remedy. What are the tools that allow that to occur?”

The process involves a comprehensive look at each site: Professionals analyze the zoning, past and current land use, nearby transportation corridors and sensitive environmental areas like wetlands, said Ted Wall, Maul Foster & Alongi Oregon operations manager and principal engineer.

“You go from hundreds and hundreds of parcels to a few,” he said. “As the number of sites gets to a manageable number, there will be outreach to those property owners to see what is possible – what the city can do.”

One measure to encourage private development on brownfields involves changing the perception that environmental contamination poses a barrier, Wall said. State programs provide funding and low-interest loans to assist planning and cleanup so that sites are restored to productive use.

“The economics of the environmental component are manageable within the economics of the development,” Wall said. “The environmental components are nothing but another line item on the pro forma.”

One project that benefited from state cleanup funding was Ava Roasteria, a downtown Beaverton coffee shop that formerly was a gas station. The project is one reason why Beaverton city officials are undertaking a brownfields inventory, Wall said.

“It’s a good example of a property going from dormant and really a blight to something successful,” he said. “(Beaverton officials are) trying to replicate that.”

Cheyenne Chapman, a legal policy analyst with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, said the stigma surrounding brownfields is starting to dissipate, especially in the wake of the recession. She coordinates the DEQ‘s Prospective Purchaser Agreement program in which the extent of contamination on a brownfield site is assessed and a cleanup plan is created during a change in ownership. Currently, about a dozen projects in Oregon are going through this process, she said.

“We’ve had a steady uptick in the number of inquiries that are coming in and a rise in applications,” she said. “As the economy picks up, it might be (that) reusing these sites in one form or another becomes more attractive.”

The post Opportunities in brownfields appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Intel Corp. and a Portland property developer are looking to “hack” into the minds of urban planners.

On May 31, Intel’s Innovation Lab and the Zidell Companies will team up to host in Portland the second , which aims to bring people together to solve community problems. The events, organized in concert with the White House and other federal agencies in more than 90 U.S. cities, are intended to spur creation of technological items that support livability – such as an app that allows drivers to report potholes, or a software platform that facilitates distribution of affordable housing.

The May 31 event in Portland will take place at Zidell Yards, at 3121 S.W. Moody Ave., from 1 to 4 p.m. Brandon Barnett, director of business innovation at Intel, said in a prepared statement that the 33-acre property at the South Waterfront offered an “incredibly unique” opportunity to “brainstorm how innovation might be built into the area’s design, development and overall culture.”

In September 2012, the Zidell family unveiled an ambitious master plan for development of the waterfront site, and in fall 2013 it opened its first mixed-use building there.

Barnett said Intel anticipates approximately 75 to 100 people to attend the “hackathon” event. People are invited to participate in specific team challenges, or simply observe the effort.

More information is available at .

The post Innovation, urban development set to collide appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

The design of a building can be integral to its success, especially when its owners hope an entire community will spring forth.

“A lot of attention (is) being paid to the ground (floor), where most people will interact with the building, with the idea that the neighborhood that is being born – kind of as we speak with respect to the larger property – is begging for life,” said Tom Cody, a managing partner, of the firm’s project on Southwest Moody Avenue. “And so the idea of having a front porch for the neighborhood with these gracious steps and a place for people to meet and to be … I think is going to be very transformational and will kind of provide a glimpse of what is to come.”

This week, ZRZ Realty, the real estate arm of the , unveiled its plans for a seven-story, mixed-use apartment building with 118 units. The $20 million project represents the family business’ first development on a 33-acre waterfront site that it spent the last couple of years cleaning up after many decades of industrial use.

Matt French, managing director of ZRZ, said the company hopes to break ground later this summer so that the building’s opening can coincide with the nearby Collaborative Life Sciences Building, which is under construction. ZRZ is planning to cater to the approximately 3,700 students, researchers and faculty members expected to flock to the area.

Located near the Ross Island bridgehead and the future Portland-Milwaukie light-rail bridge and Gibbs Street pedestrian bridge, the site may become more connected than any other in the city. The goal of the design is to spark activity.

“It’s very dynamic; it has movement,” French said of the building’s exterior facade. “It kind of resonates with our history and the shipbuilding, and the materiality of it was an important part of the design … and the way it leans – it’s somewhat like a ship’s bow.”

Indeed, the exterior facade tilts so that the floor plan gets bigger as the building rises. The facade also features a rusty, bronze metal material called Corten in an attempt to suggest a massive, industrial hull.

The sizes of the market-rate apartments will be modest, so that targeted tenants can afford them. Units will range from 490 square feet for a studio to 907 square feet for a deluxe, two-bedroom model. The building will have 6,625 square feet of retail space, ground-floor patio space and communal decks on the second floor.

Cody said retail spaces also will be small to promote community.

“If you design big spaces that are cavernous and cost a lot of money to improve, then you’re probably not going to get interesting tenants,” he said.

Small spaces offer accessibility for neighborhood businesses, which the development will need to be successful, he said.

“They need a pub,” Cody said. “They need a place to hang out. That’s what it’s lacking and so those are the kinds of things that we’re trying to bring, and so you need to design spaces that resonate with those people.”

But the long and narrow site, though near transit, sits on a 30-foot slope down to Southwest Moody Avenue and is essentially squeezed between the Ross Island bridgehead to the north, Grover Street to the south and Interstate 5 to the west.

Gene Sandoval at , the project’s architect, said a challenge was to make the building significant but not overpowering in comparison to the Ross Island Bridge. To that end, the 75-foot-tall building uses large windows to open up the hallways to natural light and views of Mount Hood and downtown to the north, and hides from the evening sun in the shade of the hill to its west.

Sandoval said the design team will seek a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design gold rating. A design commission hearing is set for June 7.

Cody said there is always an element of luck in the success of any development project, but he feels that the amount of thought that went into this one has established a solid foundation.

“(The Zidell Cos.) have been stewards of the land for generations and I think the quality of the building they want to build is indicative of that ongoing stewardship,” he said. “They put a real premium on design, and what they do they want to be meaningful, from a design perspective and from a community building perspective.”

The post Zidell unveils plans for first waterfront development appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

, the real estate arm of the , has acquired a 43,000-square-foot building on the South Waterfront.

Located at 3030 S.W. Moody Ave., the building sits on 2.77 acres and brings the Zidell property along the waterfront to 33 contiguous acres between the Oregon Health and Sciences University tram and a planned light-rail station. In 2001, Zidell developed a long-range vision statement for the site that envisions the area as an urban hub for housing and commerce.

ZRZ purchased the building, which is about 75 percent leased, from a group of investors, said Kathleen Mazzocco, a spokeswoman for Zidell. The company has no immediate plans for the building or its tenants.

Zidell also has plans to build a new, seven-story apartment building at the northwest corner of Southwest Moody Avenue and Grover Street. A design commission hearing is set for June 7 for that project.

The post Zidell acquires more land in South Waterfront appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

A barge-building company’s 30-acre site along the Willamette River, slightly north of the South Waterfront District, is finally being cleaned up. After years of studies and discussions, crews are continuing to remove contaminants and cap others along a 3,000-linear-foot stretch of riverbank.

Today, a team will update Portland City Council on the project. A tight in-water work window and many permitting requirements challenged the project team, but the in-water work is finished.

“We’re very happy and relieved to be here,” President Jay Zidell said.

From 1926 to the 1960s, Zidell Marine Corp. performed various types of industrial work on its waterfront site. The company began building barges in 1968, and will continue to do so.

In 1987, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality and the federal Environmental Protection Agency decided the site needed additional investigation because of its history of use. Over many years, a project was developed through a DEQ voluntary cleanup program. According to DEQ documents, the site was contaminated with metals, diesel, motor oil and lube oil; polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and highly toxic polychlorinated biphenyls also were present.

Crews first removed “human health hotspots” and “ecological hotspots” from the area above the river, project manager Paul Fishman said. This past summer, the project became more complicated.

“This year from May to November was a much larger project,” Fishman said. “We did everything in the river and the riverbank.”

Work in the Willamette River can be performed only during certain “fish windows,” to protect habitats. Additionally, the Zidell Marine Corp. team needed more than a year to gain project approval from the National Marine Fisheries Service. Other permits, including one issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers under the Clean Water Act, presented challenges because of scope and complexity, Fishman said.

“Actual conditions of the river are different in each section of the 3,000 feet,” he said.

Contaminants were handled differently at various points in the river.

“In some areas we excavated contaminants and graded the bank to a more gentle slope,” Fishman said. Some contaminated sediment was dredged out as well.

In areas where crews didn’t remove contaminants, they “capped” the ground with sand and added heavy rock to protect the two-foot sand cap from waves, currents and boats. Other areas received a different kind of cap made of fabric that filters contaminants.

To avoid potential conflicts, the project team coordinated its work with crews constructing the Portland-Milwaukie light-rail bridge, Fishman said.

“Delays of one kind or another were a constant factor, in terms of how to avoid being delayed,” he said. “TriMet was under the same condition.”

Fishman said crews are working on ground above water to finish cleaning up contaminants. According to Len Bergstein, a consultant working for Zidell Marine Corp., the team now considers the cleanup work “substantially complete.”

Landscaping and some remediation will continue through next year, Zidell said. The barge builder will then be responsible for maintaining involvement in development over the next five years, to ensure that remaining contaminants aren’t disturbed, DEQ project manager Scott Manzano said.

“Beyond next year we will be planning for the ultimate redevelopment of the property,” Zidell said.

Those plans, announced previously, call for a large, multiuse-type development.

“To a large degree, the marketplace will drive what people are going to want down here,” he said. In the meantime, he added, “We’ll keep building barges as long as we have customers.”

The post Zidell site team celebrates substantial completion of work appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

This summer, construction crews on the Portland-Milwaukie light-rail bridge project need to build four in-water structures. Meanwhile, crews working to clean up the Zidell site need to remove and “cap” contaminants along 3,000 feet of shoreline. Both teams have four months to do this work – and they’ll be working in basically the same place.

“It’s like sharing a bathroom – you have to schedule ahead and take your turn,” said Ralph Salamie, project sponsor with bridge design-build contractor Kiewit Infrastructure West.

Because of Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife regulations, in-water work on the Willamette River is limited to July 1 through Oct. 31. After years of planning for each individual project and about a year of weekly coordination meetings featuring the two teams, both are confident that they have an effective plan to start this week.

The cable-stay bridge is a $134.6 million portion of the $1.5 billion Portland-Milwaukie light-rail project. The design will allow the bridge to mostly be constructed without in-water work, with the concrete span poured piece by piece using forms suspended from each of the bridge’s two 180-foot-tall towers.

This summer, bridge project crews need to construct the base for where those towers will be constructed inside two cofferdams. A steel frame will be lowered into the river and filled partially with sand to create a construction area separate from the river.

“The beauty of the cofferdam is that once we build this ‘bathtub,’ so to speak, we work inside of it, without risk of impacting the environment,” Salamie said. “We construct the bridge foundations inside the cofferdam.”

Bridge construction crews will also construct two trestle bridges that will connect the towers to the riverbanks.

In the Zidell project, 30 acres of land will be cleaned up and contaminants will be removed and covered along 3,000 feet of shore between the Ross Island and Marquam bridges.

The timing of each phase of work will be essential, to keep the projects on schedule and to prevent environmental damage, said Len Bergstein, a consultant for the Zidell project.

“If we cap and contain materials in the riverbank, we want to make sure the bridge crews’ work doesn’t come along and poke a hole in that cap,” he said.

Zidell will start with some preliminary engineering and bank work on the part of the river it shares with the bridge, while the light-rail bridge crews will start by focusing on the east bank. When Zidell is finished with initial work, bridge work will begin on the west side.

There will be some benefits to the simultaneous projects: some of the sand used to fill the cofferdams will be used to cover potentially hazardous sediments on river floor in the Zidell cleanup area. Adding sand and rock into the river for mitigation of hazardous materials became part of the bridge project, said Steve Litchfield, Portland-area manager for HNTB, which was the design consultant for the project.

Additional issues with hazardous materials led to some permitting issues, “but we managed to get through it,” Litchfield said.

“It’s been an elaborate orchestration and synchronization of both projects,” Bergstein said. When all is said and done, he expects the projects to be “a poster child for public-private partnership.”

The post In-water work for Portland-Milwaukie light-rail bridge to begin Friday appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Even though no construction is taking place, Portland’s next big development site is moving forward.

Zidell Marine Corp., the Portland barge maker that owns a 30-acre site along the city’s southwest waterfront, has completed the first phase of a $20 million cleanup on the site. The company now has plans to clean up the shores and river-bottom on the site during next summer’s in-water work window.

While the company still manufactures barges on the site, it’s been targeted for commercial mixed-use development for years by the company, developers and the city because of the site location. The property is sandwiched between the edge of downtown Portland and the new South Waterfront neighborhood.

This summer’s work included removing or capping 17,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil. Additionally, the project included putting a two-foot soil cap near the bank edge where the city of Portland’s future greenway trail will run.

Len Bergstein, a local lobbyist working on behalf of Zidell, said the company will push forward with the work on the banks and in the water next summer to meet the state mandated deadline. The project will be especially intriguing, Bergstein said, because the cleanup will take place at the same time as the construction of the new light-rail bridge that will go across the Willamette River near the project site.

“If you want to talk about project staging, this is going to be quite the orchestration during a short in-water work period,” he said.

The post Contaminated soil cleared from Zidell site appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Zidell, the Portland maritime firm, says it wants to turn its industrial property along the Willamette River into a “spectacular mixed-use” development, though most of the land must undergo a state-required environmental cleanup.

The property runs along the west bank of the Willamette, from the Marquam Bridge to just south of the Ross Island Bridge. Zidell submitted a permit application last week to remediate 18 acres of it, and says the work will cost $20 million.

The main contaminant there is PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, “a known cancer causing agent,” said Keith Johnson, cleanup program manager for the state Department of Environmental Quality.

Now banned by the federal government, PCBs were often used in heavy electrical equipment, to prevent oil from getting too hot and breaking down or catching fire, he said.

The 18 acres are part of a broader, 30-acre stretch Zidell owns there, and the company plans to develop all of it “over time,” company spokesman Len Bergstein said Tuesday.

He said a “spectacular mixed-use district” there would benefit from TriMet‘s planned Portland-Milwaukie light rail extension, which would run near the property, and other nearby, planned developments.

“This has got the potential for having, you know, best access to the river in the Portland community,” he said.

Tony Cassie, regional manager for Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investment Services in Portland, said the site has several good qualities, including close access to the waterfront and downtown.

But the South Waterfront District condominium market is already “saturated,” he said, and the condo market in general won’t improve until the jobless rate goes down.

“How many thousand condo units do you have down there already?” he said, noting that a lot of ground-floor commercial space has yet to be filled.

Zidell’s joint permit application to remediate the 18 acres was submitted Dec. 18 to Oregon’s Department of State Lands and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The cleanup is a result of a 2006 consent agreement between the company and the state Department of Environmental Quality. Bergstein said the cleanup work is expected to start in 2011.

Johnson, the cleanup program manager, said PCBs do not break down easily and can be inadvertently consumed by fish, which are then sometimes eaten by humans.

PCBs and other contaminants on the site, including lead and asbestos, are in river bottoms and on the west bank of the river, he said.

Nevertheless, any mixed-use development, though years away, would end a lengthy industrial history.

According to Zidell, industrial uses began there in 1916, with the founding of Commercial Iron Works, which, during World War II, delivered 185 ships to the U.S. Navy from the site.

Zidell’s founder, Sam Zidell, leased some of the property in the 1920s for his industrial equipment business and later bought the firm’s current land as it expanded into steel and steel reclamation, industrial valves and pipe fittings, and barge building, according to a company history.

Zidell still has an active barge construction facility, though Bergstein said it’s unclear what would happen to that division of the firm if the property is developed.

“It’s a good question and it’s an unsettled question,” he said.

The post Zidell plans waterfront development appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.