Balfour Beatty’s special projects teams are renowned across the Southeast for their award-winning Class A offices, mixed-use developments, retail and more, but the team is equally adept at balancing the unique needs of publicly funded clients with a responsibility to ensure wise stewardship of taxpayer funds. Even outside of special projects, our teams’ unique combination of national procurement expertise, lean practices and deep trade partner networks ensure public clients can achieve maximum value on even highly technical projects.

On Osceola County Fire Station 85 in Kissimmee, Florida, our special projects team has leveraged every advantage of a collaborative delivery model, managing a wide range of specialized trade partners and equipment vendors and seeking out every value engineering opportunity to provide a fire station that is cost-efficient, resilient to Florida’s weather extremes and ready to serve the county for many years.

Design and Procurement Efficiency

Balfour Beatty and Osceola County sought maximum efficiency in the overall design of Fire Station 85, and thus used an already proven and repeatable design from the county’s architecture partner, BRPH. With several iterations of the design already constructed elsewhere, the county had already worked through many design kinks. As the saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Still, our team’s procurement expertise, operational agility and overall civic experience ensured the county’s plans could proceed on an accelerated schedule and at a reliable cost.

“We have a longstanding partnership of trust with Osceola County, including many successful projects from courthouses to corrections to other fire stations,” says Operations Director Henry Thacker. “The County trusts that we will seek out every advantage and efficiency on civic projects, and we’ve repeatedly reinforced that trust with success.”

Our team on Fire Station 85 didn’t have direct input on the initial design, which again utilized a proven template for a successful fire station. However, the unique nature of civic project procurement offered several opportunities for our special projects professionals to advise the county on cost-efficient materials and supply chain conditions.

On civic projects, materials are often procured directly by the client for tax exemption purposes, including basic materials like concrete and rebar that might otherwise be purchased by our team or by trade partners. In that case, our team still conducts our standard of excellence in preconstruction, obtaining early cost estimates from trade partners and vendors we know and trust before sharing that information with client stakeholders.

“With our national scale and reliable local networks, we often have a lens into market conditions, supply chain disruptions and materials quality that clients may not,” says Project Manager Adam Lentz. “Clients like Osceola County can still achieve the immense cost savings of direct purchasing while we also provide market expertise and steer them toward vendors and materials that ensure those purchases are as cost-effective as possible.”

Owner direct purchasing can constitute as much as 20 percent of a contract value, with sales tax savings in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. When serving the public good using public funds, every dollar saved only further proves the client’s commitment to fiduciary duty.

Full Resiliency and Advanced Systems

Building resiliency is already a major concern for owners in hurricane-prone Florida, and never more than for a facility that must be kept fully operational during inclement weather or other natural disaster events.

Metal building skins are often used as a cost-saving measure for fire stations in other areas, but for Fire Station 85, our team utilized a superior option: tilt-up cast concrete. More cost-effective than full masonry and more long-lasting and weather-resilient than metal, tilt up walls will help ensure the county’s investment is protected for years to come.

Our team also worked with the client to ensure that the station’s critical communications infrastructure could remain operational in the event of power disruption and even disaster conditions, including an advanced system of intercommunication between Fire Station 85 and other nearby stations and Emergency Operations Centers (EOC).

“Modern fire stations have many highly technical telecommunications and weather analysis systems that keep nearby residents safer,” Adam says. “With our fire station and EOC experience, our teams are adept at constructing reliable underlying infrastructure, then communicating and coordinating with the highly specialized trade partners and vendors that install these systems.”

At every step of these projects, our teams’ emphasis on constant communication and collaboration between all stakeholders shines through, providing clients like Osceola County with the confidence that our team’s commitment to exceptional quality is unwavering.

Partners in Public Trust

When building vital public facilities, from fire stations to city halls to emergency operations centers, Balfour Beatty understands that our clients take their public investiture seriously.

Our teams proudly take ownership of that responsibility. We come alongside the mission of public stewardship with industry-leading operational practices and a client-first approach to collaboration that ensure accelerated schedules, reliable budgets and successful projects that better our communities.