James F Battin Federal Courthouse Design-build

The GSA awarded Mortenson a design-build contract for this new U.S. Federal Courthouse in Billings, MT, as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The courthouse's site is approximately 1.8 acres and encompasses approximately 128,742 gross SF of space. The new facility includes courtrooms, judges chambers, offices, and public spaces to serve the Court’s 10-year requirements through the year 2020.

The courthouse is designed to include three courtrooms, four chambers, and prisoner areas for the U.S. Marshals Service. It also includes administrative areas for the United States District Court, probation, the U.S. Marshals Service, the United States Attorneys' Office, and General Services Administration (GSA).

The James F. Battin Federal Courthouse was a design-build project funded by the American Recovery Act (ARA). Two principal goals of ARA were to inject stimulus dollars into local economies through "shovel-ready" Federal projects; and to improve the energy performance of those Federal projects. As a baseline for energy performance, the government chose to use ASHRAE standards. Through a series of prescribed calculations by ASHRAE, the average courthouse project should have an energy performance of 87,700 BTUs/sf/yr. ARA required Mortenson, as the design-builder, to beat this baseline amount by 20% (a goal of 70,160 BTUs/sf/yr).

As reported by GSA, actual energy use for the building in 2019 was 43,473 BTUs/sf/year – more than 50% lower than ASHRAE standards and 40% lower than the ARA goal.

The project team achieved a LEED Gold rating for this project.