It was situation seemingly ripe for collaboration. A park district with funding but no land and a ­community college with land but no funding.

At the turn of the new century, both the Tualatin Hills Park & Recreation District and Portland Community College found themselves facing the need to grow.

The school was looking to bolster its curriculum with sports facilities and athletic areas, and the crowded park district needed to develop a recreation complex, all in a rapidly growing area of western metropolitan Portland, Oregon.

Fortunately, the college held the title to a parcel of land and a solution was born. Plans for a 32-acre recreational facility —in an area already teeming with new homes and other development – were crafted.

The result was a multi-use recreational facility that fulfills both entities’ needs, serving a variety of segments in the community and winning awards thanks to its sustainable features.

A perfect match
Portland Community College, which has four campuses in the Portland area, pursued the recreational district project for its Rock Creek campus. The college leased 32 acres of its land to the Park District for 25 years, with three, five-year renewal options, all for one dollar per year.

“The bottom line of the deal is the community college put up land that is actually a very valuable chunk of property,” said Mark Hadley, a project manager and registered landscape architect with WHPacific, Inc., a multi-disciplinary firm with 17 offices throughout the western United States.

“The raw land itself is worth $500,000 to $600,000 an acre,” Hadley said. “So to put up the 32 acres was an admirable play on the college’s part. The park district could never have afforded to purchase the land and construct the project together.”

On the park district’s end, the cooperative effort allowed for much quicker construction than the park district staff had thought possible.

“It was a great, great partnership, and without this, it would have never happened,” said Gery Keck, the park district project manager and senior park planner.

The resulting Tualatin Hills Park & Recreation District (THPRD)/Portland Community College Rock Creek Recreation Facility, which took a year and a half to construct, officially opened last fall.

It features two synthetic turf fields that can be used for soccer, lacrosse and football; four softball/baseball fields; practice fields; tennis courts; and a jogging trail. It also has an internal pedestrian plaza and concourse, picnic areas, concession/restroom facilities, play equipment, on-site maintenance facilities, and fully automated irrigation and lighting systems.

Win-win collaboration
According to the terms of the agreement, the college has access to the site between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. on weekdays and the park district runs programs from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. and on weekends. The concept of organizations working together is nothing new and has been tackled on other projects throughout the Portland area, but Hadley believes this cooperative effort was unique.

“I’ve never seen it at this scale, with such a large project and such a large piece of land,” Hadley said.

The key to making the cooperative effort work, Hadley said, was a fluid communication process. Still, once the work was under way, the organizers had to resolve a larger laundry list of details.

“As the project started and everyone rolled up their sleeves, one of the issues that had to be continually addressed was the parking arrangement,” Hadley said.

The park district and school eventually decided that the 275 new parking stalls for the athletic facility would involve shared parking, an arrangement Hadley dubbed a “win-win.”

“The college operates it during the day so during daylight hours students can use the parking lot. On the evenings and weekends it’s used by the park district,” he said.

Hadley said even with constant communication between parties, it was impossible to avoid the extra layer of coordination the project demanded.

“My client was the park district, yet the college was a stakeholder and partner with my client, even though I didn’t have to contractually respond to the college. That was an extra challenge in the sense I had two clients and sometimes they had competing goals, but we worked through it,” he said.

Sustainable features
Hadley is quick to trumpet the efforts on all sides to create a host of ­environmentally friendly aspects with the project. “That probably is the number one key element of the site when you talk about sustainability and stewardship,” he said.

Keck agrees.

“One of our initial goals was to implement as many sustainable elements as we could,” he said.

The project features one of the largest installations of pervious pavements for parking in the Portland area, with 46,500 square feet, or over an acre of SF-Rima pavers.

Hadley said he strongly favored this paver system because of its distinct spaces between each block, which he saw as the best option for the area.

“There are numerous types of pervious pavements to keep stormwater on the pavement, but we felt this product was going to be the most effective,” he said.

“It has the best ability to resist siltation over time; others over time will plug up and no longer work. SF-Rima has fairly wide spaces between each paver block so they have best chance of functioning over a long period with the least problems of being silted up,” Hadley said.

There was also visual reasoning for Hadley’s choice. With the clearly evident spaces between pavers in the SF-Rima layout, Hadley said it would be hard for patrons to miss the environmental effort.

“It’s a visually understandable system,” he said. And although the care of the pavement isn’t significantly different than for traditional asphalt, Hadley said techniques do vary.

“Initially, the maintenance staff will have to gear up with different equipment than in the past, but over the long term, it shouldn’t be any more costly to maintain than standard pavements, and it will last longer“ he said.

Keck said the maintenance staff has adjusted well to working with the new pavers and the district sees the project as an opportunity for an overall education effort on environmental maintenance.

“They’ve been really good about getting on board and asking good questions,” Keck said.

The permeable pavers are the first the district has used, according to Keck, who said they held up well in the recent wet winter season. Hadley believes so strongly in the product, in fact, that it seems feasible to him that it will become a staple in projects throughout the area.

“This is where it is headed,” Hadley said. “I think we’ll see it more and more with the environmental stewardship and stormwater issues here in Oregon. Water quality is a much heightened issue in our development.”

Lights, turf and watching water
The growth and urbanization of Western Oregon has increased the awareness of water quality issues, perhaps more so than in other areas of the country, according to Hadley.

“An appropriate goal for larger developments (in the area) is to keep most of the stormwater on site,” he said, adding that the Park District project did manage to come close to this goal.

Of the sustainable features on the project, the pervious pavement was the biggest investment. But the effort also ­involved landscape infiltration and bioswales throughout the parking lot that treat stormwater runoff from the site.

The Park District originally considered drilling some wells on site for irrigation water, but the hydrogeologists on WHPacific’s team could not identify a productive aquifer.

“The ground water resources are just not available in this area,” Hadley said.

To cut down on water use, the area’s two soccer fields are made entirely of synthetic turf.

“It doesn’t need any irrigation or any fertilizer, and therefore no nitrates or phosphates are going into the watershed,” Hadley said.

The fields are designed to be multi-use as well as sustainable, so district officials can lay out soccer and lacrosse fields and even baseball fields; fitting in as many activities in the area as possible. Portable mounds are used for the baseball fields, providing the most flexibility to adjust the field size for different age classes.

This allows the district to continue serving a variety of athletic interests, said Keck, who added that the development features the largest continuous synthetic turf surface in the Northwest.

“The more use we get out of there, the better for the community,” Keck said.

For the areas that do require water, the park district relies on a RainBird MAXICOM System that uses weather station data to determine the exact amount of water needed.

“We implemented some of the best water conservation controls available. Sometimes that gets overlooked on a large project like this,” said Hadley, who pointed out that most projects can boast some kind of water-saving measures but not necessarily to the same scale.

Keck said the MAXICOM system has been a district standard for several years because it allows precision monitoring of the area.

The 11.5 acre grass baseball fields feature an engineered soil including a calcined diatomaceous earth soil amendment called Axis. It is designed to hold water in the soil longer and reduce irrigation water requirements.

“It’s a naturally porous material that both increases infiltration and plant available water in the soil. It holds 142 percent of its own weight in water and the roots of the grass can draw from that longer,” Keck said.

The renovated area also features park furnishings, including benches, picnic tables and trash receptacles, made of recycled materials, Hadley said.

“Also, we planted arboretum trees all over the site,” said Hadley, and project managers worked with campus administrators and horticulture professors to develop a list of trees they wanted on campus to augment their curriculum. The effort resulted in a diverse pallet of more than 500 trees on the site.

“So we incorporated some unique species, but it’s basically a good mix of arboretum trees that we planted along the site on the berms,” said Hadley, pointing to the effort as another successful partnership between the park district and the college.

The athletic field lighting system, manufactured by Musco, saves on electricity costs through a green design. It is engineered to combat the way conventional lighting decreases in efficiency over time, according to Hadley.

“Musco has come up with a controller that in a sense meters out the electrical voltage going to the lamps. So the first year rather than burning lamps at their 100 percent brightness capability, the electrical controller reduces the amount of voltage going to the lamp so they’re able to extend the lamp life over a much longer period of time,” he said.

“The net result is you get more light for less electrical use over time. It’s truly a green, energy-efficient system,” Keck said, adding that the system allows workers to adjust the lights and turn them on and off via cell phone. The technology enables designated staff members to call the data system in Iowa to make changes.

“They’re working great, our staff loves them,” he said.

Drawing attention
Shortly after the development’s 2007 opening, it won the Oregon Recreation and Park Association Award for Design and the site will be featured on a sustainability tour later this summer when the Special Park Districts Forum is held in Portland.

Overall, Keck said the process has gone remarkably smooth. “We both kept a real open line of communication through the process. Everybody had their needs on the table,” he said. “We’re serving generally the same patrons so it was easy to come to the solutions we did.” SLDT