Managing director Harry Schoening and senior vice president Bob Hunt of Jones Lang LaSalle's Public Institutions practice in the Pacific Northwest are handling the RFQ process on behalf of Marin County. The RFQ process will lead to a request for concepts (RFC) followed by a request for proposals (RFP). Jones Lang LaSalle will manage the entire process and make recommendations to the county, after which the county's board of supervisors will make the final selection of a group to design and construct the facility.

Marin County's Office of Emergency Services is currently housed in the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Marin Civic Center, commissioned in 1957 and now a National Historic Landmark. The new facility, which does not yet have a site but will likely be built close to the Civic Center campus north of Downtown San Rafael, is expected to be open by 2014.

The project was approved by the supervisors in July. It calls for a first-phase development, with a budget estimate of $58 million, consisting of approximately 54,600 square feet of essential service space plus up to 6,500 square feet of ancillary space. Roughly 27,700 square feet of essential service space would be built in the second phase. Although the project will be built in two phases, the selected team will be asked to present the entire design as one.

Schoening says that JLL has already fielded a lot of initial inquiries from the architectural and design field about the project. Hunt points out that the project "isn't a traditional development," but instead is a highly complex public-private partnership. He adds that the teams would be required to provide plans to design, construct and partially finance the project. The county is providing the bulk of the anticipated project costs but the design/development team selected may also have to provide gap financing, if needed.