Principal and Architect Adam Krason and Project Manager Rodney Pauley from ZMM Architects and Engineers shared updates during an interim committee meeting for the WV State Legislature on December 10, 2024. Information from that presentation was shared in the following WV Metro News article.

State legislators receive update on state consolidated lab

By Morgan Pemberton, WV Metro News — December 15, 2024

SOUTH CHARLESTON, W.Va.—- The development of the WV Consolidated State Laboratories Facility continues to make progress.

Last year, funding came down from the state legislators for the start of the project, that would put a consolidated lab in South Charleston at the West Virginia Regional Technology Park. The new lab will house seven different state agencies, the Department of Health-Office of Laboratory Services, Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Department of Labor- Weights and Measures, WV State Police Forensics, West Virginia University, Marshall University and WV Department of Administration-General Services Division.

Architect and principal for ZMM Architects and Engineers, Adam Krason says that they are finishing up with an important phase in the process.

“We’re making great progress on the project, we’re completing the design and development phase of the work now,” Krason told state lawmakers at an interim committee meeting last week. “It’s an incredibly large and sophisticated project and that’s reflected by the number of participants that the state has involved as well as the number of participants that we have on the design team.”

The facility will have four floors, and each floor will have the different agencies on them, with the department of heath occupying three of the four floors.

Project Manager for ZMM, Rodney Pauley, said that they have put a lot of time into planning the interior part of the building.

“And there all oriented with a long corridor that separates the left and right sides of the building and what that does it breaks it into a north and south plane,” Pauley said. “And on the southside, is where were trying to keep all of the offices that’s the very nice view that looks out over the trees, over towards 119 and then the back of the building is all of the lab spaces.”

Krason said that they are activity working closely with everyone involved to progress the project even further.

“Schematic design phase which we wrapped up in September, we had more than 65 participants from the state regularly meeting with our team,” Krason said. “We’ve met with each representative agency more than 10 times, up to this point in the design process we’ve had more than 50 meetings with all of the stakeholders across the board, they’ve also formed a committee of stakeholder representatives where they meet internally and Rodney them joins in order to feed additional information to the design team.”

The project has been allotted $250 million dollars to complete. At the state interim committee meeting, they were asked if they now right now what the project is going to cost them. Krason said that they don’t have a definitive cost, but they are doing estimated costs after each phase. He said that the last estimate came in to be 9% or 10% over the budget. However, he said they are using that estimated cost, to try and see what they can do in the design phase to get it under the budget.

“So we’ve used the design and development phase as an opportunity to see where we can make concession, squeeze, make changes to the design to bring it back in to that budget,” he said. “We know there’s a limit on what this can cost, and we’re going to continue to work until bid day to make sure that we get this within that budget.”

They expect building construction procurement, which would include the advertisement, bidding and award to be from mid-June 2025 to mid-September 2025.

Despite, the progress it’s making, it has seen a change in the original timeline. Originally, the plan was to have the facility completed and agency moved in by December 2026, however the date has been pushed back until February 2028.

And when asked about the abrupt timeline change by state legislators, Deputy Director for WV General Services Division, Robert Kilpatrick who has worked closely with the design team, said it was because as time passed, they have a better outlook of what the project will entail.

“I think we have a more realistic picture of the size and complexity of the building, so it’s just sort of expanded, some of those individuals’ timelines that we put in our original timeline,” Kilpatrick said.

Construction of the building currently is expected to start mid-September 2025 and finish up mid-September 2027, with the agencies moving in beginning mid-November 2027 and ending in mid-February 2028.