Mercer Island Public Works

Client: The City of Mercer Island

The City of Mercer Island is a 6.4 square mile island, a verdant pacific northwest biome, surrounded by Lake Washington, that is home to over 25,000 people. From public works to community services, and from law enforcement to parks and recreation, city government maintains a dedicated staff entrusted with serving the public and–over the long haul–making sure that things the government touches are left in a better state for future generations.

City of Mercer Island Public Works employees are tasked with servicing critical infrastructure, responding to emergencies, and maintaining public lands for the wellbeing of island residents. The City of Mercer Island Police Department is charged with providing high-quality law enforcement and community services for the safety of island residents and visitors. But at this moment, staff find themselves striving to maintain services in facilities that no longer support their work. The discovery of hazardous materials throughout Mercer Island’s City Hall permanently closed the building in 2024, forcing staff to work from home or in ad-hoc community rooms. The police department, also housed at City Hall, was cast into temporary, portable trailers, and made to rely on their automobiles as a primary workspace. Adjacent public works facilities are obsolete and in disrepair. Constructed 45 years ago on a forested and sloping site, these structures and service yards provide inadequate workspaces—housing only 50% of the workforce—and inadequate operations areas—vehicles, heavy equipment, materials, and service areas must squeeze into small, irregular patches of level ground, and are exposed to the weather and subject to deterioration. The Mercer Island Public Works project is designed to realize new, contemporary buildings and service yards for city employees while protecting and enhancing the native habitat on the city’s existing twelve-acre site. The project is designed around three unifying principles; Consolidate Facilities and Landscapes, Restore the Local Ecology, and Cover Everything. Consolidate new buildings to make working relationships more effective and operations more efficient; consolidate landscapes to increase the quality the native habitat, fostering restoration and creating new opportunities for employees to engage with the environment. Restore the site’s ecology by repairing two annual and perennial stream courses and enhancing landscapes intended to support the biodiversity of on-site forests and wetlands. Cover vehicles, materials, and heavy equipment; cover outdoor service and storage areas and cover the spaces in-between to enable employees to work indoors and outdoors, to move between vehicles and warehouses, and to prepare for service in the community without hindrance from the Pacific Northwest’s near constant rain and occasional snow. The Mercer Island Public Works project is a holistic set of new municipal service structures and enhanced native habitats, existing in balance on a renewed and heavily forested site, with new buildings and outdoor workspaces linked through a single mass timber roof that both shelters and elevates this working environment.