Winter settles over the Fountain Square Retail Center construction site in Brookfield. Photos courtesy of The Jansen Group Inc.

Jansen digs in for peat's sake

It was the deepest, darkest, blackest stuff Scott Boettcher had ever seen.

It covered 20 to 25 acres. It was anywhere from 4 feet to 15 feet deep throughout the construction site. Boettcher could see the ground bounce when people walked on it. It even bounced when trucks drove on it.

It was peat. It was everywhere. It had to go.

"We had trucks and trucks for months and months taking away peat and bringing fill in," said Boettcher, The Jansen Group's project manager on the Fountain Square Retail Center project on Bluemound and Moorland roads in Brookfield. "It's a huge pain. Very few people want it. Some people took it for their worm farms. Some took it to mix with their topsoil."

No matter who took it, Jansen had to get rid of it quickly if the contractor was going to get the first stage of the project completed before winter set in last year. But Jansen reached its goal and turned its attention to constructing nine buildings, comprising nearly 187,000 square feet, for 11 retail stores, ranging from a new PETsMART to a new Goodyear Tires store.

The Fountain Square Retail Center construction site is filled with yards and yards of peat before The Jansen Group gets started in August 2004.

Even with the peat out of the way, it's a project that has thrown multiple hurdles at Jansen, Boettcher said. In one block of four buildings, Jansen built three, while Elder Jones, Minneapolis, constructed the fourth, a Circuit City.

"It's tough because you have to coordinate everything from mainstream material to light fixtures to window tints," Boettcher said. "If they're not the same, somebody has to change it. It was a big challenge because we had to double-check everything everybody was doing."

The need for that coordination stemmed directly from the tough standards of construction in Brookfield, Boettcher said.

"They want to make sure that what is going in is going to look good," he said. "We've got a whole second floor of parapet, which is a façade that looks like a second floor. We call it Hollywood architecture. It looks nice, but it's much more expensive."

The coordination difficulties reach all the way to the leadership of the project. The job's owner is in Menomonee Falls, the city of Brookfield has a hand in the project, the architect is in Ohio, and the structural engineer is in Madison.

But with all the challenges, Jansen keeps plowing through. In August, the contractor will watch Circuit City open and then move on to the next round of retail construction.

"It's fast-paced and a lot of work," Boettcher said.

- Chris Thompson