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Leopardo Cos. has nearly completed its work on the $91 million, 200,000-square-foot, LEED Gold seeking Aurora Police Headquarters & Branch Court.

The project that began in June 2007 will soon come to an end for Leopardo. The city of Aurora will have some finishing work to do on the interiors and it will have to complete the 911 call center within the facility, but the headquarters should be operational by early 2010.

Upon completion, the facility will use 27.5 percent less energy than a building of comparable size. The energy savings alone are impressive, but the project also has numerous features that give it unique functionality and environmental benefits.

The Aurora Police Headquarters will incorporate many different features— permeable pavement, photovoltaic panels, liquid crystal glass among others—to meet its goal of being a LEED Gold rated facility. It will also be a multifunctional building, as it will house office space for the Aurora police, a detention center, a branch court, and the area’s 911 call center.

“A project like this has a lot of people involved including city staff, police officers, designers, engineers, and more all coming with different goals and perspectives,” says Leigh McMillen, project manager for Leopardo.

“The whole team recognized early on that it would take all of us working together to build a police facility of the highest quality.” Through many planning sessions that included the architects, Phoenix, Arizona-based McClaren Wilson and Lawrie with Cordogan Clark & Associates as the architect-of-record, Leopardo, and city officials, the team was able to put together a wish list of green features and attributes that the final product should include. Many of their ideas came to pass.

The project relies on permeable pavement in its main public parking areas. The pavement is solid enough to handle 10,000 pounds per square inch, making it safe for large municipal vehicles, semi trucks or fire engines to drive on. The real benefit will be in the environmental improvements to the surrounding area and the residual energy savings for the police headquarters.

Rather than having one solid slab of material as most parking structures do, permeable pavement is made up of thousands of small l-shaped blocks of concrete with a 3/8 inch break separating each one.

Although it is not often standard to use permeable pavement, municipalities favor this type of material because it allows for a natural water drainage system that avoids flooding and standing water.

Rainwater can seep through the open spaces in the pavement and drain into the soil where the natural sediments in the ground will cleanse the water. The parking lot is built on a slight slope, which should drain all of the water in the same direction and then flow into the development’s retention pond.

The permeable pavement not only provides preferable waste water management options, but depending on the color of the material, it also helps reduce the heat island effect that blacktop traditionally creates. The pavement at the Aurora facility is a lighter color, chardonnay in this case, which results in more light reflection.

“The pavement can reduce the heat load on the facility,” says Jay Rients, manager with Unilock, the Aurora-based manufacture of the pavement used at the site. “Black surfaces collect the heat, creating an island effect that requires a facility to use more air conditioning energy.” Traditional asphalt has a solar reflective index ability of .12, yet the permeable pavement has a SRI ability of .36, which can result in a 15 degree difference within the facility, says Rients.

Perhaps one of the greenest features of the new facility does not involve any green products or design per se, but instead relies on clever problem solving to eliminate excess square footage, thus lowering the development’s foot print and impact, while saving the municipality and the taxpayers thousands of dollars.

The state of Illinois mandates that detention centers must keep male, female and juvenile detainees separate at all times. Traditionally, this results in the construction of three different detention areas so these groups never come into contact with one another.

In Aurora, the developers and the architect implemented a unique solution to this problem that would not require them to build three separate areas, but instead, create flex dorms to allow female, male and juvenile detainees to be side-by-side.

However, the parties involved would be completely unaware of this.

Liquid crystal glass, or smart glass as it is often dubbed, is a type of glass that can change from transparent to opaque with an electric charge. This is a process known as glazing. It can be used for such purposes as limiting UV rays into an interior space.

At the Aurora detention center the glass will not receive any sunlight.

There, the facility will draw benefits from its ability to glaze and become opaque, obscuring views. This way, male detainees could presumably be housed in the same detention area as females. When detainees are all secured in their cells, the glass will be clear so guards can observe them.

However, when a new detainee enters the facility, the glass will be charged and turn opaque. Detainees will not know who is walking the hallways.

Thomas Cook of Valley Security Company in Oswego was charged with completing this task. He had never worked with this kind of glass before, but after seeing its benefits, he believes that it will become more popular in the future.

The glass costs $200 a square-foot for purchase and installation, but the cost is more than offset by the savings in the reduction of square-footage.

“I’ve been doing this for many years and nothing compares to reducing the cost of square-footage,” says Michael Behm, vice president with Leopardo.

The facility is also designed to take advantage of daylight. The Aurora police headquarters will house office space for all of the department’s detectives.

Eventually, the city will consolidate all of its branches at this location.

The building has been constructed with passive solar design techniques.

The majority of offices have a southern exposure, which at this location allows for the most access to direct sunlight.

The designers took the idea one step further and installed light shelves.

These are reflective boards that act as an overhang next to windows and allow for deeper penetration of daylight into the facility. They can be adjusted to capture the sun at its different heights, depending on the time of the year or the time day.

“An important portion of this facility is the ability to bring daylight in,” says Behm. “This is not a very deep building.

We wanted to cut down on artificial light.” The Aurora project is the first to achieve many milestones for Illinois. It is the first municipal jail in Illinois to use flex dorms. It is the first seismically/ wind-strengthened first-responder building in Illinois. It is also receiving national attention because of the scope of the project.

“There are a lot of ‘firsts’ associated with this project,” says Behm. “This is the largest full-service municipal police headquarters under construction in the country. It’s very exciting.”

Tags | Aurora, Leopardo Cos.

© 2012 Real Estate Communications Group. Duplication or reproduction of this article not permitted without authorization from the Real Estate Publishing Group. For information on reprint or electronic pdf of this article contact Mark Menzies at 312-644-4610 or menzies@rejournals.com