Downtown Boise Building Wins Region 10 Phoenix Award
Last month’s newsletter feature for Oregon profiled the Watershed at Hillsdale in Portland, winner of the 2009 Region 10 Phoenix Award presented at the EPA Brownfields Conference last November in New Orleans. This month we look at the 2008 Region 10 Phoenix Award winner, the Banner Bank Building in downtown Boise, also honored at the November conference.
The Banner Bank Building is the creation of Boise developer Gary Christensen, owner of the Christensen Corporation, whose vision drove the project and pushed the design team to ever-higher levels of sustainability features.
What follows is an excerpt of the Phoenix Award nomination written by Scot Oliver of the Capital City Development Corporation (CCDC), the urban renewal agency for Boise and prior owner of the Banner Bank Building site. His description of the project tells the story behind this cutting-edge Brownfield redevelopment.
The Banner Bank Building in downtown Boise, Idaho is a 195,000-square-foot office building completed in 2006 that has been awarded a LEED (for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design)Platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council, the highest level of achievement. That such a project would be built in Boise is newsworthy: when it was completed the Banner Bank Building was the fourth building in Idaho to be LEED-certified at any level, and only the 16th building in the country to be certified platinum. That the project was completed by a local developer, with local designers and builders, and at no additional cost compared to a typical building, is remarkable. The Banner Bank Building represents an extraordinary level of achievement of vision, perseverance, partnerships and commitment to quality.
The Banner Bank Building is an exemplary case study of Brownfield remediation. Like most of the relatively young cities in the Intermountain West, Boise does not contain properties fitting the classic image of Brownfields: long-abandoned and dangerously contaminated. Therefore the arc of remediation traced by the Banner Bank Building begins relatively high on the “before” scale—the site was not idle or terribly contaminated—but it extends deep into the “after” region: a LEED-Platinum building that is environmentally, economically and aesthetically successful, and admired by the community.
The site that now houses the Banner Bank Building is a 0.45 acre parcel on the northeast corner of 10th and Bannock streets, on the edge of one of Boise’s urban renewal districts. The site’s prior owner is the city’s urban renewal agency, Capital City Development Corporation, which had taken ownership through a previous property exchange. CCDC acquired the property with a working four-floor 223-spaceparking garage, the Bannock Garage, built in 1963. Prior to that the site had housed Motor Mart, an automobile-related business, for which City of Boise Fire Department records showed two underground petroleum tanks installed in 1947 and no record of removal. CCDC operated the Bannock Garage as part of its downtown public parking system. In 2000 the agency closed the top floor parking deck, due to structural concerns, resulting in a loss of 63 parking spaces. The building had other environmental and structural issues, including cracking and water leaking. The engineering report in 2000 noted that the building suffered from deferred maintenance and continued deterioration. It determined that the only restoration options that would produce a 
positive return on investment would extend the building’s useful service life by only five years. Thus the site, while far from idle or abandoned, fit the broad definition of a brownfield as an underdeveloped property whose reuse was hampered by a perception of possible environmental contamination and other problems.
CCDC was awarded an EPA Petroleum Brownfield Assessment Grant in 2004 with a primary goal of performing outreach and education about Brownfield redevelopment throughout its 500-acre jurisdiction in and around downtown Boise. One of the steps the agency chose was the creation of a petroleum Brownfield inventory using all available public and historic information. The Bannock Garage site appeared on that inventory, and was incorporated into the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality (IDEQ) Brownfield inventory. Because of this listing, and the discovery and safe removal of underground tanks, the new project earned the LEED credit for Brownfield redevelopment.
The project was also the subject of a documentary film, “Green is the Color of Money”, produced by Boise resident and Academy Award winning filmmaker, Ben Shedd.
For more information about this project, contact:
Scot Oliver, Special Projects Manager
Capital City Development Corp.
121 N 9th Street
Boise, ID 83702
208-384-4264
SOliver@ccdcboise.com
