City of San Mateo, Parks Maintenance Division Relocation

This assessment and planning study looked at the viability of relocating the City of San Mateo’s Parks Maintenance Division to their existing maintenance yard at the Poplar Creek Golf Course in San Mateo.

The addition of the Parks Maintenance operations to the five-acre site more than doubles the functions currently housed at the yard, so efficient programming and planning was key. The planning effort also required taking into account numerous site conditions that restricted its usability, requiring creative ‘work-around’ solutions.

In the process of developing a written program for both the maintenance divisions D+B determined a number of rooms and areas could be shared by the two departments. This finding reduced the functional area required by the two departments, which allowed both operations to fit on the site, and also lowered future building construction costs. During the study several preliminary planning schemes were developed, two of which were selected by the City of San Mateo for further refinement. The comparison of these two schemes’ very different planning approaches became the basis for the study. Descriptive and quantitative summaries of both schemes, and site plan diagrams were included in the report.