City breaks ground on Beeline maintenance facility
Glendale officials broke ceremonial ground on the city’s Beeline bus maintenance facility project Tuesday, which will centralize administrative and maintenance operations on a 2.4-acre site near the city’s transportation center in south Glendale.
The Beeline bus system currently operates nine routes that serve Glendale and La Cañada Flintridge as well as unincorporated La Crescenta and Montrose, used to complement local Metro service.
The project was approved in 2016 and construction on the site is scheduled to begin in April, according to Eliza Papazian, community outreach assistant with the city.
The facility was designed by Los Angeles-based RNL Design — now part of Stantec, consultants for the city’s Grayson Power Plant renovation project — with a main, two-story, roughly 24,000-square-foot building that will have about 8,500 square feet of solar panels on its roof.
The design also includes a canopied area for washing and servicing buses. The remaining space will be a general work area, according to city documents.
The facility will provide dedicated parking for the transit fleet of 37 buses and nine “dial-a-ride” vans as well as staff vehicles. A compressed natural-gas fuel depot will also be onsite.
According to a description about the project by RNL Design, the site will include “sustainable architecture, which will include day lighting, solar shading, energy-efficient building systems … and local and recycled content resources.”
The scale and design takes a contemporary approach in order to conform with the residential area along Gardena Avenue, city documents said.
The roughly $20-million project was approved in 2016 by the City Council as part of the 2016-17 fiscal year capital-improvement budget. Funds were allocated from federal transit grants.
Construction of the facility is expected to be complete by late 2019.
Twitter: @JeffLanda
