Located on Richards Boulevard in Sacramento, Calif.’s River District, the 17.3-acre, 1.25 million square-foot Richards Boulevard Office Complex—now known as the May Lee State Office Complex—comprises four office towers of 7–11 stories each, a seven-story above-grade parking structure and 317 at-grade parking spaces.

Completed in spring 2024 and serving as the headquarters for California’s Department of General Services and other state agencies, the $1 billion energy-efficient complex is currently the largest all-electric, zero-carbon workplace campus in the United States. It has LEED Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council and SITES Gold certification for sustainable landscaping by Green Business Certification Inc.

Connectivity and security were of the utmost importance for this high-tech office complex, which features 5,200 workstations; a 300-seat auditorium; 325 conference, training and breakout rooms; a childcare facility designed to accommodate 120 children; a cafe with dining service; interior storage for 560 bikes; and a fitness/wellness center. T&R Communications Inc., Sacramento, provided the telecommunications support.

Open since spring 2024, the Richards Boulevard Office Complex
(now known as the May Lee State Office Complex) is a secure and
high-tech campus that houses a number of California’s state agencies.

A project of massive proportions

T&R Communications was founded in 1982 and serves northern California and northern Nevada from its offices in Sacramento; Hayward, Calif.; and Reno, Nev. 

“We’re a design-build contractor that addresses all types of low-voltage systems for the commercial segment, including structured wiring, security, audio-visual, access control, CCTV, sound masking and more,” said Dennis Moebus, vice president and owner of T&R Communications. “We’ve done a good deal of government work for California, but [we] have also completed jobs at data centers, industrial sites, distribution centers and schools.”

Moebus said that while working on another government job for the State of California in 2019, he was approached regarding T&R Communications’ availability to work on the soon-to-break-ground Richards Boulevard project.

“A contact from Hensel Phelps Construction, the general contractor for both our job at the time as well as the Richards Boulevard job, suggested that we speak to the electrical contractor on the Richards Boulevard project because they needed a team that specialized in low-voltage work,” Moebus said. “We met with the EC in Fresno, got the job and were built into the project as part of Hensel Phelps’ team.”

Given only minimal information at the time, including basic furniture layouts to support 5,000 occupants, “I provided our first budget for this project in October 2019, and we ended up doing seven budget adjustments until we finalized it,” Moebus said. 

State agencies occupying space within the building include California’s departments of Housing and Community Development, Fair Employment, Financial Management, Alcohol and Beverage Control, Real Estate, Seismic Safety Commission and several others.

“We’d been working on a $5 million project at the time and our contract value for the Richards Boulevard job was over $25 million, so we went from the little leagues to the big leagues overnight,” Moebus said.

“We had to do all of the design, submittals and anything requiring structural calculations as well as assist with layouts for cable tray pathways and coordinate with the EC so that they knew what we were installing,” he said. “We prepared designs for each of the complex’s different meeting/conference rooms requiring audiovisual capabilities and brought in a new product that had never been used by the state before—Atlona-branded AV distribution, AV-over-internet protocol, collaboration and control solutions for educational and commercial environments—with great success.”

Over the five-year-long project, T&R Communications designed and installed structured wiring, audiovisual, security, CCTV, distributed antenna systems, emergency responder radio communication systems and sound masking technology across the complex’s 36 stories of office space and multitiered parking garage. Ultimately, the team completed buildouts of 180 intermediate distribution frame racks across 38 telecommunications rooms for terminating cable and backbone and 60 main distribution frame cabinets within four main distribution frame rooms. The team also installed 450,000 feet of Cat 6 station cable, more than 3.5 million feet of Cat 6A station cable, 470 security cameras and 800 card readers across the complex’s 325 AV-­enabled rooms and 300-person auditorium.

Security, security and more security

“The new Richards Boulevard Office Complex required high security, especially in light of all the state agencies being consolidated there from other locations,” Moebus said.

The neighborhood used to be home to the state’s former printing plant, which was torn down in 2015 as part of a larger redevelopment plan. It had since fallen into disrepair and experienced safety issues. 

“Security was a high priority and was deployed on a massive scale, both in terms of all of the security cameras installed as well as the ability to assess what each camera captured,” Moebus said. “It took our team one month alone to prepare and print each employee’s specific RFID card embedded with their picture, security access level and other information.”

Security was more than just cameras, he added. In the original plans, “two of the towers were originally scheduled to be occupied by the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration and had very high security requirements, with cages segregating their cabling from the rest of the buildings’ cabling.”

T&R Communications installed terminated patch panels
with all of the network connections.

Coordination challenges

Though T&R Communications had long been used to coming onto construction projects last, being at the mercy of the other trades amid this project’s tight schedule proved especially challenging.

“If the steel or concrete activities fall behind, for example, the impact of that delay is felt on the schedule and on all of the remaining workers going forward,” Moebus said. “We may have had 400 TV monitors to install, but we couldn’t do it until the rooms were painted and secured to minimize the threat of theft or damage to our AV equipment. We had to wait for pathways to be created, painting to be completed, door frames to be installed for card reader control and carpet and furniture to be in place because a lot of what we do is mounted to furniture. We did as much work ahead of time as we could, but we couldn’t do our part until others did theirs, so we had huge punch lists that we couldn’t address until those elements were in place.”

With 35 crew members working on-site at the height of the project, T&R Communications did its best to keep moving forward. 

“As soon as an area was ready for us, we did as much rough-in there as we could,” Moebus said. “The parking garage was built first, so that’s where we started.”

The pandemic also caused project delays.

“COVID exposures on-site shut construction down completely and we lost months of work time over the course of the project, so we tried to do as much as we could whenever we were on-site because we knew we’d be crunched for time later,” Moebus said.

Pandemic-era protocols were another matter, because, while the team adhered to all safety requirements, “Sacramento gets very hot in the summer, and wearing masks while working in an enclosed building that didn’t yet have air conditioning when it was 112 degrees outside was challenging,” Moebus said.

At the same time, staying up to speed with the nearly 100 change orders T&R Communications received over their several-­year period on-site—amounting to 8,000 man-hours of work valued at $1.65 million—added another layer of difficulty.

Happily, “our GC understood that we were behind the eight ball, and we were compensated for overtime required to catch up to the schedule,” Moebus said. 

To keep up the pace and keep it manageable, “Every few weeks we met with our field foremen for constructive discussions about the project and lessons learned to make things easier for others down the road,” he said.

At a time marked by global supply chain issues, “we minimized delays by ordering materials well ahead of time, and we had a great distributor partner who held 300 TVs for us in their warehouse until the rooms were ready for us to take delivery,” Moebus said. “In addition, we took advantage of opportunities to engage in preplanning or prefab work during any downtime.”

He added, “We also had a great crew,” who often worked 10- to 12-hour days, six days a week to meet the project’s April 2024 deadline for completion.

Wrapping up on a high note

Completing the job on time while also providing building owners with a valuable two-year warranty and two-year service contract, the T&R Communications team couldn’t be more proud of their accomplishments.

“It was a great project that gave us a lot of credibility going forward in terms of the breadth of our capabilities and expertise,” Moebus said. “We had outstanding team members working on this project, and we received great support from the GC, for which we’re truly grateful.”

Following their use of Atlona-branded touch and scheduling panels and AV switching equipment on the project, which enabled operability of all of the complex’s monitor, microphone and speaker connections, T&R Communications also realized an unexpected benefit in the form of its own company’s evolution. 

“We had strong support from Atlona’s manufacturer’s reps,” Moebus said, “and it ultimately led to T&R Communication’s launch of a dedicated new AV division.”

The company has also been excited to see all of the positive changes the construction kick-started for Sacramento’s entire River District.

“The Richards Boulevard Office Complex has been a great anchor for the River District, and it initiated a revitalization of the whole neighborhood, which has since seen the construction of new apartment buildings nearby as well as a new health facility, a new soccer field and other beneficial community venues,” he said. “We’re proud to have been able to participate in the project and happy that as a smaller contractor, the GC felt comfortable and trusted us to perform the project. We look forward to continuing to work with them on other projects in the future.”

Located just 3 miles from its office, “we’re so honored to have been a part of the Richards Boulevard Office Complex,” Moebus said. “In addition to being an extremely attractive, high-performing and highly connected and secure building, it’s a great addition to the skyline and will serve the area and community members well for generations to come.”

T&R Communications Inc.