The total investment is $38 million. That includes the city’s $8.46 million in-kind land donation.
Mountain Line’s new Downtown Connection Center is scheduled to open in May ahead of hot summer weather and monsoons. The $29.5 million facility will be a hub for Mountain Line riders, drivers, dispatchers, operations and administrative staff.
The building is taking shape on the northeast corner of Milton Road and Phoenix Avenue adjacent to the BNSF railroad bridge that spans Milton.
The center will provide accessible restrooms and customer service for riders, space for dispatchers and a break room for Mountain Line drivers.
Other features include a conference room for board meetings and community gatherings, a police substation and space for a social services agency, said Jacki Lenners, Mountain Line deputy general manager.
It’s all in a two-story, 20,938-square-foot building designed to meet Coconino County’s sustainable building standards. The environmentally-friendly design by HDR Inc. is an all-electric building that includes rooftop solar panels, natural lighting from solar tubes and in-floor heating and cooling.
One other key feature is a mass-timber construction method for the transit center. The structure uses cross-laminated timber, engineered in a warehouse to fit together like a giant set of Lincoln Logs.
It’s only the second building in Arizona to use mass-timber rather than the more common building framework of concrete and steel.
This approach uses sections of wood from smaller-diameter trees glued together in multiple layers. These sections are combined to create large beams engineered to fit together seamlessly with a tolerance of one-sixteenth of an inch.
Mortensen, a Minneapolis-based builder with offices in Phoenix, assembled the first mass-timber building in 2022. It’s a 184,000-square-foot office building in Tempe called the Beam on Farmer. The multi-story structure’s carbon footprint is 10% less than a comparable concrete building, according to Mortenson.
Flagstaff-based Loven Contracting, which is building the transit center, toured the Mortenson structure to learn the best methods for building with cross-laminated timber.
Timberlab, based in Portland, Oregon, provided the mass-timber materials for the transit center using Douglas fir, according to Sam Dicke, the company’s manager of client development.
Some advantages of mass-timber construction include the need for fewer workers to assemble the posts and beams, and it can reduce the construction schedule by about 20%, he said.
“Plus, there’s a tremendous aesthetic benefit to building with mass timber.”
“Flagstaff is in the heart of Northern Arizona timber country,” Dicke said. The mass-timber transit center is “really a cool story that shows the connectedness to the nature that’s around it. It really created a beautiful aesthetic. It’s a modern take on how we used to build, showing it’s possible to do it in a more sustainable way, which is pretty cool.”
Mountain Line’s Downtown Connection Center is funded by a $21 million federal grant, $6 million from the State of Arizona and $2.5 million in local funding. The City of Flagstaff donated the three-acre building site, valued at $8.46 million, according to Jacki Lenners, the bus line deputy manager.
The total investment is $38 million. That includes the city’s $8.46 million in-kind land donation.
Loven Contracting has a substantial-completion date of April 7 for the transit center with Mountain Line scheduled to occupy the building in May, according to Kevin Bond, senior project manager.
That will complete Phase 1 of the Downtown Connection Center. Phase 2 includes redesigning the surface parking area to accommodate safe movement of buses and construction of bus bays with electric charging equipment.
Phase 2 is contingent on the completion of flood-control improvements for the Rio de Flag on the site, Lenners said.
Mountain Line has 27 hybrid-electric buses and two fully electric models with four more all-electric models on order.
Mountain Line is the local transit agency operating nine bus routes, paratransit service, vanpool and seasonal Mountain Express service to Arizona Snowbowl. FBN
By Peter Corbett, FBN
Courtesy Photo: This rendering offers an image of what the Downtown Connection Center will look like upon completion. It is scheduled to open in May.
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