EWEB goes lean, green

“Welcome to the ROC.”

Those were the first words out of Eugene Water & Electric Board spokesman Lance Robertson’s mouth Saturday as he greeted a crowd of about 200 attending a public open house for EWEB’s new Roosevelt Operations Center in west Eugene, a state-of-the-art facility that has been years in the making and opens for staff starting Monday.

About 260 employees (half the utility’s staff) will continue relocating to the site through November. The project initially was projected to cost $83.5 million, but the final cost will be closer to $71.5 million.

EWEB project manager Ken Beeson said the $12 million difference is a result both of scaling back the project a bit when costs escalated close to $100 million four years ago, and a decrease in construction costs during the recession.

Solar panels might only grace part of a fleet vehicle roof in the yard, instead of covering all buildings as originally hoped, and the main building might be 10 percent smaller than originally planned, but no one who attended Saturday’s open house seemed to notice.

“This is seriously cool,” longtime EWEB employee Judy Chase said after a tour.

Although others might have found humor in the “Romper Room” type of colors and plastic furniture in the operation center’s main building, most marveled at the modern design created by Eugene’s PIVOT Architecture and constructed by Portland general contractor Lease Crutcher Lewis.

It’s a place that is lean and “green” and even has an Eco-Machine. In case you don’t know what that is, it’s something that processes what you leave behind if you happen to use the ROC’s facilities to relieve yourself.

“I think someone today is going to inaugurate that thing,” Robertson said.

The Eco-Machine, housed in a square cement block full of plants and bark mulch in the ROC’s courtyard, processes all the wastewater from the operation center’s buildings. The plants remove the “suspended solids” and neutralize the toxins. Clean water that comes out of the “machine” is then used to flush the toilets in the buildings or to irrigate the surrounding landscape.

This may all sound rather fancy, but it’s really just a septic tank system with plants, said Eric Gunderson, one of PIVOT Architecture’s principal architects.

Walk inside the main building and that new-car smell hits you.

The ceilings are high, more than 30 feet in some spots, the lighting is ample (140 skylights), the floors made of polished concrete and the walls painted bright red and yellow and lime-green in some places.

The project has been certified toward a “gold” standard from the U.S. Green Building Council, and the buildings are 35 percent more energy efficient than state building energy codes require.

The new facility “is good news for the surrounding businesses that will benefit from the addition of about 260 new employees in this area of northwest Eugene,” EWEB board vice president Rich Cunningham said in a prepared speech. “But it’s even better news for the staff who will be leaving the cramped conditions they now face every day, working out of deteriorating operations buildings that have outlived their usefulness along the Willamette River.”

The big question now, Cunningham said, is: When do EWEB’s customer service and administrative staff move from the headquarters building — that the city of Eugene is considering for a new City Hall — at 500 E. Fourth Ave., under the Ferry Street Bridge?

Staff is now working on an analysis that should give a better idea of when and under what conditions that happens, Cunningham said.

“Bottom line, we do know that such a move is inevitable,” he said.

Construction costs for a new administrative building at the Roosevelt Boulevard site have been estimated at close to $30 million.

“I would love for us to all be together,” said Chase, whose job as assistant to EWEB customer and community service director Debra Smith will remain in the main headquarters building. “But it’s not our choice.”