Staying Committed: Tri-Tech Engineering and the Greene County Parks and Trails Facility Addition

The task that lies before the Greene County Parks and Trails (GCP&T) team is no small one. Their team maintains twenty-seven parks throughout the Greene-county area in Ohio—including the more-than 4,500 miles of paved trails, making it the country’s largest. Each year, thousands of bikes, rollerblades, and baby walkers roll along these winding trails and hike the parks’ rolling hills. And maintaining care for it all requires exceptional commitment. And if there’s one thing the team at GCP&T doesn’t lack, it’s commitment to their parks.

Committing to caring for that many miles of trail and that much square acreage of park requires a large team and lots of equipment. So, the leadership of GCP&T wanted to build a facility that would help them continue their commitment to the parks and trails. The desired facility would house GCP&T teams and equipment in the same building. Along with offices and storage, they wanted a place for park vehicles and to improve their safe-storage capacity of low-hazard materials.

Because GCP&T is as dedicated to financial stewardship as it is park stewardship, this facility would need to be built affordably. Thankfully, GCP&T had a team of committed engineers and builders to see to that.

In 2019, Tri-Tech Engineering joined an already all-star team with Brentwood Builders, the project’s construction manager, to help build this new facility for GCP&T. Commissioned by Brentwood, Tri-Tech sought to offer GCP&T a streamlined design process along with the other companies through the cooperative purchasing contract known as Sourcewell. This purchasing cooperative enables government entities, like GCP&T, to pursue projects through a design-build-deliver process, instead of the typical design-bid-build process, cutting down on construction time and budget significantly.

Tri-Tech and its multidisciplinary design team came alongside the project’s architect, Sharp-Conway Architects, to develop a design concept for the new mixed-use facility that included structural engineering (SE) and mechanical, electric, and plumbing engineering designs (MEP).

The facility design featured a pre-engineered metal building (PEMB), and before the building could be built, 289 geopiers needed to be put into the ground.

Geopiers—or a Rammed Aggregate Piers (RAP)— improve the soil strength beneath a structure. A geopier system involves a process of “prestraining” or “prestressing” the soil through displacement (drilling large columns into the ground) and replacement (filling the columns with layers of crushed rock). Layers of crushed rocked are compacted, creating a geopiers. The newly compacted shaft of rock stabilizes the surrounding soil and doesn’t require lots of expensive complicated steel or concrete connections.

The geopier layout, though, added another constraint to those Tri-Tech had navigated, including limited space for its design and specific zoning restrictions. Tri-Tech remained flexible in its MEP design, collaborating with the foundation company to coordinate underground utilities including electric amid the almost 300 geopiers. County- and privately owned manholes and pedestals also posed another issue. To solve it, Tri-Tech facilitated multi-party conversations with county leaders and service providers to determine what existing communications utilities could be relocated—or abandoned—in its electrical design.

Tri-Tech’s mechanical design anticipated needs associated with the facility’s function as a garage and service center for park vehicles. Anticipating various fumes from vehicles and equipment, Tri-Tech’s designs incorporated fan exhausts and pad-mounted residential HVAC units. Tri-Tech choose these units to overcome physical-space constraints outside the building and to ensure easier maintenance solutions. And to meet codes for combustible gas, Tri-Tech’s designs also provided anticipated coverage of gas censors in the facility.

Tri-Tech’s plumbing designs were also coordinated with the geopier layout to ensure successful installation of sanitary piping. Tri-Tech quickly adapted the facility’s bathroom and toilet layouts to accommodate the sanitary piping layout.

Tri-Tech also provided construction-administration services throughout the facility’s construction, helping deliver a completed project to the client one year after the initial meetings with stakeholders.

Personnel moved their offices into the building and equipment filled the garage. Through the Sourcewell program, GCP&T not only received a new facility on time and on budget, but they now had what they needed to ensure the miles of trails and parks could continue to receive the care they needed. And along with Brentwood Builders, Tri-Tech offered to GCP&T the same commitment that GCP&T gives to its parks and trails.