L&S Engineering Associates Inc., a longtime firm here that designs high-efficiency mechanical and electrical systems in commercial and public buildings, struggled through slow times last year, but now its workload is the heaviest that Dale Shafer, its president, can recall.

"Last year was a tough year," he says. "The firm had a 20 percent reduction in revenue."

As part of a downsizing move, the firm bought out two principals and reduced its staff by another three employees to bring its total staff to 20, including six engineers. Three of those engineers—two mechanical engineers and an electrical engineer—are principals.

This year, Shafer says he's seeing an increase in requests for proposals and qualifications. Some of that increase might be due to anticipated state and federal stimulus funding, he says, although he hasn't seen many projects being funded directly yet with stimulus dollars.

"All of a sudden business is picking up," Shafer says. "This year, it's the highest it's been in my memory, and there's a lot of work waiting to get funded."

Shafer, who grew up in Western Washington, joined the engineering firm in 1970. It originally specialized in mechanical engineering, and it added an electrical engineering division in 1990. L&S—the initials stand for former principal Robert Luhn and Shafer—has operated under its current name since 1991, although its roots here go back to 1955, when Everett L. Rice founded it as Rice & Associates.

Its offices now are located in the two-story Commission Building, at 216 W. Pacific, where it owns 5,500 square feet of office space on the second floor and about 2,800 square feet of storage space in the basement.

L&S focuses on high-performance design, meaning it specializes in efficient energy, lighting, heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems.

"We want to be known in the community as experts in sustainable design," Shafer says.

Sustainable—or green—design ensures a project will meet the needs of today's generation without hindering the ability of future generations to meet their needs, he says. The concept is centered on reducing the environmental impacts of building projects through attention to air quality, conserving water and energy, and efficient use of building materials and other resources.

"A big part of our work was always into energy conservation," he says. "Interest in that is only growing."

L&S designed the innovative heating and cooling system in the former Saranac Hotel building downtown, Shafer says. The system employs a geothermal ground-coupled heat pump that pipes 50 degree-water directly from the aquifer through a high-tech radiator system to heat or cool the building, depending on the season.

"I see it as borrowing energy from Mother Earth in the winter, and giving it back in the summer," Shafer says.

The Saranac, which is owned by longtime Spokane attorney Jim Sheehan, is the first building in Spokane to receive the highest rating of platinum though the Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) green-building rating system. The LEED system evaluates construction and design through a checklist of sustainable criteria using a point system that enables buildings to be certified at silver, gold, or platinum levels.

Although L&S didn't work on a big rooftop solar array at the Saranac, it designed some of the first nonresidential solar-energy systems to be installed in Eastern Washington, including a bank display on the South Hill and a solar heating system for a school in Mattawa, Wash., Shafer says.

It's also important that designs take advantage of natural lighting through strategic placement of windows, skylights, and other openings for optimum performance and comfort without interfering with cooling systems in warmer seasons, he says.

L&S's biggest client is Spokane-based NAC/Architecture Inc., which designed the $74 million Shadle Park High School modernization project that's expected to be completed next year.

"We're the mechanical and electrical consultant and subcontractor to NAC" for the Shadle project, he says. "L&S designed the heating, cooling, plumbing, and energy-management systems for the project."

The firm also was a subcontractor to NAC on the renovation of the Fox Theater downtown, which has since been named the Martin Woldson Theater. That project presented unique constraints due to the historic status of the building, Shafer says. It called for quiet air ducts in a building that wasn't designed with an air-conditioning system. To be able to move enough air at a slow velocity to ventilate the theater silently, the system had to be quite large, he says.

Well into the renovation project, the contractors were notified that they couldn't build an addition to the historic building to house the system, Shafer says. L&S completely redesigned the HVAC system and put it inside the 1931 structure within a few months, or the $31 million project would have lost some of its federal historic-preservation tax credits, he says.

Instead of calling for an addition to the building, L&S's new design lowered the floor of the old furnace room by 8 to 10 feet so it could house the HVAC equipment. "You have to put this stuff some place," Shafer says.

The firm's main market area includes Eastern Washington, North Idaho, and northeast Oregon, and about two-thirds of the firm's jobs are on public-works projects. L&S works on about 150 projects a year, and its fees range from $1,000 to $1 million per project, he says, adding, "We have to do a lot of projects and get a lot of stuff out the door."

L&S's upcoming jobs include design work employing energy-efficient technologies for a $44 million renovation of Sunnyside High School, near Yakima, Wash.; two replacement elementary schools in Hermiston, Ore., that have a total estimated cost of $32.8 million; and an $18 million replacement elementary school in Connell, Wash.

Shafer sees a bright future for L&S and firms like it.

"The building industry has been given strong challenges for conservation," he says.

For instance, the American Association of Architects has adopted a goal of making all new buildings carbon neutral—producing zero net greenhouse gas emissions—by 2030.

"That puts a lot of pressure on design professionals to find new ways to build buildings," he says. "A lot of innovation falls on mechanical and electrical engineers. They are the ones who understand energy consumption."