National Park Service ~ Marrero, LA ~ 7,072 SF ~ $4,962,000

The Barataria Preserve offers trails, fishing, hunting, and wildlife viewing within the preserve’s 26,000-acres of hardwood forests, swamps, bayous, and marshes.  As a key research center in the lower Mississippi River Delta, the National Park Service funded the relocation of the Barataria Preserve’s Jones Point Biological Research Station to an existing NPS facility better equipped to withstand the impacts of hurricane winds and storm surges. ST JOHN Principal Ed Setzler served as AE Project Director for the site assessment, master planning, value analysis, and schematic design for relocation of the Jones Point Biological Research Station to an existing underutilized National Park Service facility. Faced with a highly constrained construction budget, the AE team’s careful facility assessment and value-based decision making process led the National Park Service to recognize an opportunity to reuse existing space, consolidate visitor and student education programs into an existing facility, and deliver all project objectives with a net 2,400 SF reduction in square footage, eliminating the need to construct a new facility within the ecologically sensitive Barataria Preserve.