Salt Lake City Public Safety Building

The six-story, 175,000-square-foot Salt Lake City Public Safety Building frames views of the Wasatch Mountains to the east and is a pedestrian-friendly development. It has four levels of administration space and two levels of underground parking, with enough spaces for 392 vehicles. The facility houses the police and fire departments, a dispatch center, and emergency operations center.

The Public Safety Building was designed to not only withstand a 2,500-year, 7.5-magnitude earthquake, but also remain fully operational afterward. It also is the first U.S. public safety building to achieve a net-zero-energy rating. The key to meeting the net-zero challenge was reducing energy loads. The building’s renewable energy is produced by photovoltaic and solar thermal arrays. In addition, the building uses LED low energy lights, taps into a solar hot water heating system, and energy use is tracked by a monitoring system.

Salt Lake City was recognized by the Utah Pollution Prevention Association and Clean Utah because of this building, garnering the 2013 Outstanding Award for pollution prevention in the state.