Minneapolis Bus Garage

The Minneapolis Bus Garage Project consists of a 350,000-square-foot bus garage to support a fleet of new buses for the City of Minneapolis. This includes a 3-bay fueling station, 2 bus washing bays, 24 maintenance bays, parking for 220 busses, underground employee parking and 3 floors of office space.

During preconstruction, Harris worked with the EOR to value engineer the mechanical system to substitute single package simultaneous water to water heat pumps to provide the building’s cooling and primary heating. This substitution increased energy efficiency, reduced CO2 emissions and created additional space in the mechanical room to add future equipment, all with zero additional cost to the project. Additional VE efforts have saved $377,000 in first costs. Roof drains capture rainwater through two miles of storm piping and pre-filtered through multiple underground Vortex filters. The rainwater which is stored in a 40,000-gallon underground tank and filtered by a rainwater reclamation skid to wash the bus fleet. Additional systems include 16 large custom energy recovery air handling units, 4 multi fuel condensing boilers, CRAC units for data rooms, fuel oil piping and compressed air.

In an effort to reduce crew sizes and minimize on site material handling on the project site, Harris made a considerable effort to prefabricate, including pump skids, water heater skids, piping racks, ductwork runs, storm piping and sanitary piping. This effort resulted in 25% of field labor going through our fabrication shops.