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Scripps, Finally
After years of delay, $187 million project is moving forward in Palm Beach County
By Debra Wood
After suffering through a rocky and contentious start, The Weitz Co. and DPR Construction are now moving ahead rapidly with construction of the Scripps Research Institute’s Florida campus in Palm Beach County. The much-touted project, delayed by a couple of years by legal issues, is now moving full speed ahead, with completion set for December 2008.
Enticed by county and state incentives to establish a biotechnology presence that would trigger high-tech and high-paying job growth, the California-based Scripps Research Institute located temporary laboratories within Palm Beach County until it settled on a permanent site.
With construction now well under way, county officials say there has been progress in attracting other firms to the area.
“Florida was interested in an economic development project to encourage biotech development in the state and approached Scripps,” says Ben Morris, vice president of facilities services for Scripps in La Jolla, Calif. “The politics have been the most challenging [part of the project].”
The Florida Legislature appropriated $310 million in 2003 to support operational costs of a Florida division of Scripps. Several jurisdictions vied for the science company, and Palm Beach County won. The county agreed to pay for 100 acres of land and funds to build the first phase of the campus.
Shortly thereafter, Scripps began operations in temporary buildings at Florida Atlantic University in Jupiter and selected a construction management team comprised of Weitz of West Palm Beach and San Diego-based DPR Construction. The pairing had come together as a result of DPR having worked with Scripps in California, and Weitz’s extensive experience in Palm Beach County, says Taras S. Diakiwski, vice president with Weitz.
The joint venture team began working on a $137 million, three-building campus at “Mecca Farms” on the western side of the county in 2005 and had built up to the second floor. The county envisioned the 1,900-acre property becoming a research village, with Scripps as an anchor on 100 of the acres. Then local activists and environmentalists weighed in.
One of the groups fighting the use of the Mecca Farms site was 1000 Friends of Florida, a nonprofit entity which advocates on issues related to growth. The 1000 Friends group contended, in a public statement dated April 12, 2006, that “development the size of downtown West Palm Beach was totally inappropriate on the fringes of the Everglades. Such remote sprawling development would undermine both the local and state comprehensive planning processes, and harm restoration efforts for the Everglades and the Loxahatchee River.” The group was joined by the Florida Wildlife Federation, Audubon of Florida and the Environmental and Land Use Law Center in opposing the use of the Mecca Farms site.
As the buildings went vertical, a federal judge stopped work on the project, ruling that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had inappropriately issued a permit for the development of the Mecca Farms site, Morris says. U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks determined that the Corps failed to consider cumulative and indirect impacts associated with developing the site.
That forced Scripps and the county to start over with an alternative plant. Construction is now proceeding on a three-building, $186.7 million, 30-acre campus at Florida Atlantic University, adjacent to the research institute’s temporary quarters.
“It’s a smaller property than what we had at the Mecca site, and the buildings are tighter,” Morris says. “Construction has been pretty straightforward once you get out of the political arena.”
Construction progresses
A joint venture between Zeidler Partnership, which is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, and Bohlin Cywinski Jackson of Pittsburgh designed the contemporary-styled campus.
“The Scripps program is strongly functionally driven, and each building has a different research theme,” says Roxanne Sherbeck, an architect at Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. “The concept was to optimize each building for the research that was to be happening.”
The three-story, 100,258-sq-ft Building A will house drug discovery and include chemistry labs. It topped out in May.
The Administration and Advanced Technology Building, a four-story, 118,870-sq-ft structure designed by Zeidler, includes engineering labs, offices, an auditorium and a cafeteria. The three-story, 132,675-sq-ft Building C, the biomedical research building, contains biology labs and topped out in June.
Scripps has hired many of its scientists, but they were not on staff in 2004 when the buildings were designed. The design-construction team is now working with Scripps to modify the labs to meet those scientists’ precise needs. Weitz-DPR anticipates installing 143 fume hoods and 7,020 lin ft of lab benches.
Weitz-DPR began construction in October, separating the start on each of the three buildings by two weeks.
“It’s an exciting project, a once-in-a-lifetime project,” says Chuck Congdon, senior project manager for Weitz.
Deborah Beetson, project director and senior project manager for DPR, says she expects the workforce to peak in January at 500.
All three cast-in-place concrete structures sit on slab-on-grade with spread-footing foundations. Site preparation required compacting the soil using vibrofloatation, a process used to increase the density of the dirt. The team used a seismograph to monitor vibration to ensure it did not affect Scripps’ ongoing research.
“Our biggest problem was at the building pad at C because of its proximity to the existing facilities Scripps is occupying at FAU,” Congdon says. “We had to dig a trench to separate the Building C pad area from the existing building.”
Weitz-DPR will use 20,200 cu yds of concrete. Exteriors are masonry and stucco, with some curtain wall, metal panels and punch windows. The project will consume 90 mi of electrical conduit, 473 mi of electrical wiring, 55 mi of piping and plumbing, and 294 tons of ductwork.
Beetson estimates mechanical, electrical and plumbing work accounts for about one-third of the project value. The buildings share utilities and a mechanical system, with redundancies that will allow for full-power backup in the event of an outage.
“The amount of air you have to push through a building like this is much greater than a standard commercial building,” Beetson says.
The architects incorporated glass for natural light and extra insulation for energy savings. Morris anticipates completion in December 2008.
Palm Beach County set a goal that local, small business enterprises perform 15 percent of the work. Weitz-DPR has contracted with local subcontractors whenever possible, but due to the specialized laboratory equipment, that hasn’t been easy, Diakiwski says.
The biotech promise
Scripps has attracted businesses to Palm Beach County, says Kelly Smallridge, president of the Business Development Board of Palm Beach County. Several small firms, including Biotools, which relocated from Illinois, and start-up Disc Motion Technologies have established a presence, and some local firms have expanded. The county is currently working with three medium-to-large prospects.
“Scripps has validated that Palm Beach County is a viable and competitive location for the bioscience industry,” Smallridge says.
Although painful at the time, the Mecca Farms saga and legal wrangling that held up Scripps has had no impact on recruiting new businesses to the area, according to Smallridge. She says clients rarely bring it up, and international prospects do not even know about it.
Educational leaders have gotten on board, with Palm Beach County schools adding three bioscience magnet high schools and Palm Beach Community College establishing a 90,000-sq-ft training academy. FAU is working with Boca Raton Community Hospital and the University of Miami Leonard M. Miller Medical School to build a 530-bed teaching hospital, something Smallridge considers a critical component for a bioscience cluster.
“[Businesses] are interested in coming in the early stages and establishing a new facility in an area that will be globally competitive and is on the map in the nationwide bioscience industry,” Smallridge adds. “The different in interest pre-Scripps and post-Scripps is night and day.”
Useful Sources:
The Scripps Research Institute
http://www.scripps.edu/news/press/092305b.html
Scripps Research Institute Florida Project Team:
Owner: The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, Calif.
Program Manager: Fluor Corp., Irving, Texas
Construction Manager: A joint venture between The Weitz Co., West Palm Beach, and DPR Construction, San Diego
Architects: A joint venture between Zeidler Partnership, Toronto, and Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, Pittsburgh
Structural Engineer: Walter P. Moore, Tampa
Plumbing: William R. Nash, Boca Raton
Mechanical: Pool & Kent, West Palm Beach
Electrical: Bergelectric, Orlando
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