Balfour Beatty Infrastructure Inc

Client:

City of North Richland Hills

Scope Of Work

Value Engineering Saves Richland Hills Residents $6.8 Million on Landmark Municipal Project

Just minutes from Dallas and Fort Worth, North Richland Hills is the third largest City in Tarrant County with more than 67,300 residents, 1,200 businesses and 30 major employers. In 2006, North Richland Hills was named by Money Magazine as one of the 100 Best Places to Live in the United States.

Currently, North Richland Hills’ city services are housed in six buildings on three different campuses, two of which are being impacted by the Loop 820 widening. North Richland Hills' new facility will consolidate City Hall, Public Safety and Municipal Court services into one campus.

Balfour Beatty is providing construction management at risk services for the new North Richland Hills Municipal Complex. Situated on a nine-acre site, the three-story facility features a façade of natural stone, metal panels and glass and will house more than 60 city departments. The new 185,000-square-foot facility includes a 61,970-square-foot city hall, a 73,031-square-foot public safety building, 4,648 square feet dedicated to judicial/courts areas, a 15,063-square-foot detention center, a 16,108-square-foot warehouse, and 700-space horizontal parking garage.

Being a public entity, the City has a fiduciary responsibility to the taxpayers of North Richland Hills to receive maximum value for each construction dollar spent. After the initial phase of budgeting was complete, the cost of the project was $4.4 million over budget primarily due to construction inflation, which was unacceptable to both the City and Balfour Beatty. After an exhaustive value engineering process, our project team presented the City with a list of more than 250 value engineering items that would reduce the cost of the project by $6.8 million.

Our Operations Director for this project, Chad Brewer, used his open, honest approach to win the trust of our primary client contact, Police Chief Perdue. At the beginning of the project, he and his team made sure to include the Chief and the design team in all post-bid meetings so they could join in the discussions with the subcontractors. This allowed everyone to see the level of detail we go through and see us discussing logistics, planning, scope and price to ensure the project starts on track and stays on track.

Chief Perdue has enjoyed working alongside Chad. “Throughout our project, Chad has done an excellent job of listening to our needs and wants. This allowed time for us to examine different options,” says Chief Perdue. “During this process, he provided input on our ideas and identified cost and overall project impacts. Rather than direct, he guided, allowing us to reach our decision.”