Over the winter of 2022-2023, I spearheaded the project of a new vehicle maintenance building for a public utility in the high rocky mountains. Alongside a project manager, I guided this project from the very first client interviews all the way to the delivery of a conceptual design package.

To preserve privacy and non-disclosure,all locations, organizations (excluding my then-design firm) and people have been anonymized, changed, or ommitted from this report.

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Full Conceptual Report

The primary point of complexity in this project arose from the cramped site conditions. To the west is the existing water treatment plant, and to the east are protected wetlands. The nature of the project’s design, involving planning for the turning radii of vehicles 40 feet or longer, required an actual and accurate understanding of these conditions.
The first point of contention came from the wetlands. This is a small but flourishing riparian area, and its protection is critical. The US Army Corps of Engineers would say there should be at least 15 feet between their borders and any construction, including grading and paving. Meanwhile, parts of the Hawk County Land Use Regulations refer to a setback of up to 75 feet between all wetland and river areas. This latter constraint would have effectively halved the usable area of the site.

It was my thorough research that found this potential difficulty, and I presented my findings and proposed solutions to the Board of County Commissioners in a closed meeting. After a drawn-out process of examination and interpretation of the relevant code and zoning, a very fair compromise was reached: As suggested by the original biologist/surveyor who staked the wetlands in 2009, a setback of 25 feet would be respected from all areas of the wetlands, with special effort paid to maintaining that distance.



The second issue was a more fundamental one. Our design team, as well as the engineering consultants, were working with site materials provided by the district, including surveys and a map from an incomplete design effort about 10 years prior. However, while we were well into diagramming circulation and early programming, I began to integrate modern imagery, and something was...off.

Two weeks before a planned all-stakeholders design charrette meeting, I figured out exactly what it was:

In 2017, the district finished a long-planned and delayed expansion to the northeastern end of the treatment plant. This included expanding the plant’s footprint as well as new signficant landscaping and paving which cut significantly into our project’s site. The only issue? These changes originated in a different parcel and so never registered in the history of ours, and the client’s assurance of the up-to-dateness of their provided survey was simply taken as a given. This assumption should not have been made.

My discovery provoked essentially a complete reset of the site layout - a painful realization, but a necessary and ultimately cost-saving one.