Boom Town : Private Construction Wanes, but State Building Projects Have Sacramento Humming

In a striking exception to California’s stagnated urban construction scene, the blam, blam of the pile driver echoes through downtown Sacramento, pounding merrily along, scarcely missing a beat through good times and recession times.

One by one in recent years, construction projects rising in the capital city have added office space equal to the area of about 100 football fields. The once-sleepy river town, where not long ago only the Capitol dome rose above the treetops, is having itself a prolonged building boom.

Commercial development has done its share, and, in fact, accounts mainly for remaking the skyline into something resembling that of a major city. But here, like elsewhere, private investment in commercial high-rise construction dried up during the recession.

Most of the continuing expansion has been undertaken by or for some level of government. Right now, the major midtown construction going on is a massive new federal office and court building near the Amtrak station. And nearer the Capitol are gleaming new additions to the Sacramento Convention Center, a city project.

But the real master builder during the current surge has been state government, with conspicuous results from any viewpoint.

Some of Sacramento’s new state buildings are remarkably eye-catching by the standards of public structures. Some are simply huge. Each costs tens of millions of dollars and fuels arguments over methods of payment and suitable location.

Next to go up downtown is an 850,000-square-foot office building (the equivalent of nearly 15 football fields) to house as principal tenant the California Environmental Protection Agency. The Cal-EPA structure will be Sacramento’s sixth major state-owned building begun or completed in less than three years.

Projects awaiting legislative approval include two new massive low-rise buildings in the suburbs and a cluster of new high-rise buildings on state-owned property south and east of the Capitol. State government is a major employer in town, where the state work force, excluding college and university employees, totals 62,600 at its seasonal peak. There are 195,700 state employees statewide.

The current spate of capital city construction matches and by some measures exceeds that which marked the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then-Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. oversaw the building of several office complexes at which designers experimented with solar energy, natural lighting and new ventilating techniques. Results were nil to mixed.

The tenures of Govs. George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson, who followed Brown and were less adventurous, nevertheless coincided with the completion and planning of equally notable building projects.

In 1993, one of the largest public buildings in the West was completed on the eastern Sacramento outskirts for the State Franchise Tax Board. Thanks to this project, with its 20 acres of floor space, your state income tax return winds up in a room nearly a quarter of a mile long.

The building exceeds in size the facility in Fresno where most Californians send their federal returns and even bests the dimensions of the Internal Revenue Service headquarters in Washington.

With all that, authorization--though initially turned down by lawmakers this year--is being sought to more than double the state income tax agency complex by 1 million square feet to make room for added tasks and to share space with other departments. At another suburban site, officials propose a 160,000-square-foot building to house a new state computer center.

Switching from bigness to refinement, in 1994 a striking new Secretary of State and Archives building was completed on the quiet, tree-shaded south side of the Capitol. Employees go about filing election, corporate and political-contribution documents amid artful paneling in various California woods. Walls and floors are done in hues of terra-cotta, poppy gold, ocean blue and Sierra green, and a large “Constitution Wall” faces an inside courtyard.

Some say the design-rich structure has the feel of a modern art museum. It’s unusual enough for government buildings to create “feel,” a recent visitor remarked, “other than the feel of standing in line.”

The adjoining archives section, arguably the state’s fanciest warehouse, likewise follows artistic design lines, and in 1997 is scheduled to open a large museum depicting themes of “the land, people, promise and politics of California,” according to Bob Jennings, an official who took a reporter on a tour.

In May, a new Department of Justice building, the most recent of the new state buildings completed in Sacramento, opened on the busy north side of the Capitol--if opened is the right word. A tight-security structure, the 17-story building features bulletproof glass separating receptionists from visitors. Surveillance cameras sweep the premises continually, armed guards patrol around the clock and access is severely limited even to those who work there.

Employee key cards are coded to open only certain doors. Government lawyers from one division may not visit a lawyer from another division on another floor without an escort, explained Steve Telliano, a spokesman for his boss on the top floor, Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren.

One of the state buildings in Sacramento completed in the last decade is also the slickest. It’s the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, or CalPERS, building and is often referred to as the Cadillac of government real estate.

Designed and equipped like no other, CalPERS’ six terraced levels are enclosed by outside walls concealed behind solid bands of star jasmine shrubbery that extend around the building for two blocks. The plants blossom in the spring, trimming the building in a blaze of fragrant whiteness.

Offices open out to trees, grass and plants rivaling city parks, planted on irrigated, earthen floors--a different garden effect created for each upper level of the building. Five to eight full-time professional landscapers keep the forest of greenery clipped and fresh.

Inside, the latest in furnishings and office equipment inspire Judy Tourville in the copy machine room to declare CalPERS the “best building I’ve worked in” in 12 years moving around the state system.

She especially appreciates the tile and marble shower room to freshen up in after her thrice-weekly aerobics classes in the workout room. She likes to lunch in the PERS Cafe Plaza, considered the prime state cafeteria, and is not far from the building’s Montessori day care center.

To those who find the layout extravagant, CalPERS points out that its $78-million cost was paid in full using only seven days of investment returns on the organization’s $94-billion portfolio. Unlike other state agencies, CalPERS receives no tax-generated money. Its funds come from public employee and employer contributions and--the biggest chunk, 67%--from CalPERS investments, according to spokeswoman Nancy Quinlan.

Few contest that CalPERS, by paying its own way, can justify ownership and maintenance of its high-end building.

But arguments go back and forth over financing of other state buildings.

Critics complain that the state lacks sufficient long-term property management planning and that when it builds, it relies on expensive financing to avoid seeking voter approval to borrow money at a cheaper rate. The legislative analyst’s office points out that by funding building costs from lease revenue bonds, the state is paying so much in interest that the final bill almost doubles actual building costs.

Lease revenue bonds are paid off, typically over 20 years, from funds formerly used to pay for leased buildings.

Wilson Administration officials call lease revenue financing a good investment of the people’s money. In the long run, they say, the state comes out ahead financially by moving from leased to owned premises.

Officials note that as the current upswing in construction shows, the state is nibbling away at escaping its lease obligations. Currently the state leases 7.3 million square feet of office space in and around Sacramento and owns 5.1 million.

Whether the facilities are leased or owned, however, management of state properties remains so haphazard that unmet maintenance needs alone amount to $3 million, according to Jeannine L. English, executive director of the government-monitoring Little Hoover Commission.

Further disputes crop up over concentrating new state offices near the Capitol rather than in the Sacramento suburbs where land is cheaper.

Political foment over where to build appeared to die down somewhat after the respected Urban Land Institute of Washington, D.C., evaluated state property development around Sacramento in April. An advisory panel from the institute concluded that it made sense to group some offices near the Capitol, consolidate operations and build on the 42 city blocks the state owns in the downtown area. It is on these properties that some new buildings were built and others will be located later, planners say.

The governor, preaching frugality, has ordered his agencies to conduct surveys on whether cuts in services and contracting out to private industry are justified. But it appears that state building trends could escape the downsizing ax.

Republican political appointees interviewed for this article had nothing but praise for the new and often stylish state buildings coming up on Wilson’s watch.

“You don’t build Taj Mahals,” said Kevin Eckery, a deputy director of the State and Consumer Services Agency that oversees state building policies. But you should “show respect to people and you do that by building something they can be proud of at a reasonable cost.”

Bob Jennings of Republican Secretary of State Bill Jones’ staff, while showing off the styling of the Secretary of State and Archives complex, remarked: “These are our institutions. They should be as beautiful as we can make them.”

As Jennings spoke, he stood in the building’s courtyard, studded with Japanese maple and small pine trees. Across the courtyard rose the complex’s 95-foot-high Constitution Wall, inscribed with stirring words like Assemble, Petition, Liberty-- and, faintly etched across the entire wall, visible only in a certain light, RIGHTS.

Constitution Wall, Jennings said, in a way stands guard over California’s 1849 and 1879 constitutions. Just behind it is the section of the archives complex where those historic documents are stored in environmentally controlled vaults.

Today, most public business in the archives is done in the Research Room, where visitors can examine other historic documents--under watchful eyes. Surveillance cameras, Jennings noted, scan the room for anyone razor-blading out well-known signatures to peddle on a collectors’ black market.

The public can use a genealogy section to trace family roots.

Not all the new buildings are so glamorous.

The 1,900 employees moving into the State Board of Equalization building in 1993 occupied a 24-story tower of no particular distinction, except that it was new and consolidated agency functions from 10 leased locations.

Seeming to have met the norm for life in a new state building, most of this tax agency’s employees are assigned modular compartments uniformly 9 by 8 feet and uniformly gray in design. Pinning smiling faces and children’s drawings on the outside of the cubicles is discouraged.

Shades of blue set off the ubiquitous gray in Executive Director Burton W. Oliver’s modestly appointed office. He sits at a wood-top desk, unlike the functional laminated work surfaces elsewhere in the building. But the furniture in the boss’s office comes from the same supplier serving most state offices--the state prison workshops.

The best office space goes to the tax agency’s five elected board members who, like other elected officials moving into new quarters, could order their own furniture for their stylish quarters. Nearby, for example, Secretary of State Bill Jones boasts a tastefully appointed oval office, though on a smaller scale than that other one in Washington.

A cross-section of office workers interviewed at several new buildings said they appreciate the upgraded surroundings where climate control devices--and the cafeteria food--can be depended on.

Even Ray Martinez, working in that quarter-mile-long room in the state Franchise Tax Board building, described himself as a satisfied employee. Martinez does a job not yet automated, sitting at a concrete-reinforced desk pounding dates and file numbers onto tax returns with a hand-stamper.

It’s OK, he said. “They give me five minutes off every hour to rest my arm.”