Michael Monosky, Senior Project Manager, presented at the 2021 Design-Build for Water/Wastewater Virtual Conference on the award winning Coachella Valley Water District Palm Desert Critical Support Services Facility  project.

The Coachella Valley Water District (CVWD) had a vivid desire to create an inventive solution to improve their outdated existing facilities that would serve Critical Support Services ranging from the monitoring of the entire water service area for the Coachella Valley (SCADA Control), implementation of an Emergency Operations Center (EOC) in the event of a major seismic event and provision of a world-class water testing laboratory in a single facility on their Palm Desert Campus.   CVWD sought to engage a Design-Builder to transform their needs into a turnkey project delivery while doing so with a fully collaborative process to ensure the functionality of their new facility met their exacting and high standards along with functional and reliable efficiency.  With a clear vision to service the community, our design-build team’s mission was to not only bring the best solution to the complex program, but to maximize the use of available land, seek opportunities to lean operations, increase sample turnaround, improve redundancy and resiliency, preserve reliability, and provide a project that delivered flexibility, efficiency, and revolutionary critical support space to benefit the community at large.

Swinerton submitted this Project for consideration due not only to the Project’s financial and schedule successes, but also the professional successes of collaboration, mutual respect and professionalism that the Design-Build model helped our collective team to achieve.

As no project is perfect, there are many lessons learned that we will share with our organizations’ teams to leverage success on future projects including but not limited to the following:

1. Perform multiple reviews to determine the specificity needed for specific equipment used for laboratory testing on highly specialized tests.
2. Intense preplanning for building in extreme climate desert environments and the nuances that comes with these geographic considerations
3. While our collaboration with stakeholders through the client’s Project Manager was excellent, providing more detailed and intensive reviews of backcheck comments to design comments to refine expectations more thoroughly is always a work in progress