With a legal challenge now out of the way, state officials will move forward this summer with the construction of a new office building for the Minnesota Senate.

Former Republican state Rep. Jim Knoblach of St. Cloud filed a lawsuit last year to try to stop construction of the building on the grounds that the Legislature improperly included it in a tax bill instead of a construction bill. In February, a Ramsey County judge dismissed the suit.

Previously: Legal fight over Senate building takes new turn

When Knoblach appealed, a three-judge panel of the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled in May that he would have to post an $11 million bond for the suit to proceed. After the Minnesota Supreme Court agreed this month, Knoblach dropped the appeal.

But that hasn't stopped Republicans from hammering away at Democrats for their support of the contentious $90 million project. It's a key part of the GOP message on the campaign trail.

Republican candidates argue that the new building is unnecessary and wasteful. DFL leaders view it as a reasonable solution to a serious space shortage caused by the renovation of the State Capitol.

Gov. Mark Dayton supports the project, even though he criticized an early design for the building as lavish and "un-Minnesotan." Dayton describes the building as integral to the Capitol restoration.

"If you don't have somewhere to put Senators during the final phase of the reconstruction of the Capitol, you don't have a functioning Legislature," Dayton said. "And if you don't have a place for them to go, you have very tight quarters and limited opportunities to use the Capitol as I believe it should be. It should be largely available to the public. It will be an issue like many other issues, and people will have to decide for themselves."

A recent KSTP poll found the public disapproval of the building at 68 percent. The four Republicans trying to unseat Dayton are making it a campaign issue, and so are their allies. The group Americans for Prosperity highlighted the issue in a new radio ad slamming Dayton.

"Let's not forget that he spent $90 million for a brand new office building for state Senators...and new offices for himself too," an announcer says in the ad. "So, Mark Dayton is building places for politicians while we struggle to make ends meet."

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HARTFORD, Conn. Long-simmering plans to convert a prominent but long-vacant building in Frog Hollow into apartments could now get a major financing boost.

The conversion of the former Hartford Office Supply Co. building on Capitol Avenue has been approved for $7 million in financing from the Capital Region Development Authority and an additional $5 million from the state Department of Housing's CHAMP program, aimed at increasing affordable housing. The State Bond Commission must now vote on the financing, in the form of loans.

The conversion is estimated to cost $31 million.

Michael W. Freimuth, CRDA's executive director, said the Hartford Office Supply building is outside the authority's core, downtown area where it has concentrated most of its apartment financing efforts.

"We want to start to link or knit our efforts downtown to the neighborhoods," Freimuth said.

The building is considered key to revitalizing a main thoroughfare in the Frog Hollow neighborhood. It isn't yet clear when construction might begin, but Freimuth said it is possible the first rentals could be available at the end of 2016.

Dakota, a developer based in Waltham, Mass., has an option to buy the four-story building. Dakota also is now converting the former Professional Building on Allyn Street into apartments.

Dakota couldn't be reached for comment Friday.

According to CRDA, the financing package also includes a $3 million loan from the city of Hartford, a $5.4 million bank loan and $10 million in state and federal historic credits.

The apartments would be 80 percent market-rate and 20 percent rent-restricted based on income. Monthly rents would range between $900 an $1,250.

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Loans Could Bring Hartford Office Supply Building Closer To Apartment Conversion

Stacy Squires

CONSTRUCTION: Tait's Arjen Maarleveld checking progress at the new Tait Campus in May. Office buildings make up a third of new projects.

As the earthquake rebuild pushes on, a surge of new Christchurch office buildings is becoming a dominant feature in the city's construction landscape.

Canterbury's spending on non-residential construction in the first quarter of the year was 16 per cent up on the previous three months, according to Statistics New Zealand.

With the exception of a handful of projects near Christchurch's City Mall, most office buildings under construction in the city are either just west of the river in the central city, or on Victoria St, Lincoln Rd or Moorhouse Ave.

And there is a lot more construction ahead. Major projects announced for Christchurch in the past few weeks include the five-storey new PricewaterhouseCoopers office building planned for 56 to 64 Cashel St, a five-storey building at 32 Oxford Tce which will be the first for the Health Precinct and a new Music Centre to face Armagh St just west of New Regent St forming part of the Performing Arts precinct.

The city's rebuild has helped make office construction the busiest non-residential construction sector nationally.

A total of $1.3 billion was spent on non-residential construction in New Zealand from January to March, a figure which includes both commercial and public buildings.

Office buildings made up almost a third of the work underway, followed by educational and then industrial buildings.

Inside the region, a total of $352 million was spent, which was 16 per cent up on the $305m spent in the first three months of 2013.

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Office buildings dominate city construction

Bids, Contracts, Proposals

District of Columbia Clark Construction Group LLC, serving as the construction manager, has started building The Wharf, a mixed-use project on a 24-acre site in Washington's Southwest Waterfront neighborhood. The project will encompass two 12-story residential buildings and an 11-story, Class-A office building; the three buildings will total 2.1 million sq ft. One of the residential buildings will contain a 142,500-sq-ft theater-music hall. The project also includes a yacht club with 98 marina slips, two parks and a 2,500-space parking garage. Clark will raise the grade of the site by rebuilding 1,600 ft of bulkhead along the Washington Channel. The project developer is PN Hoffman- Madison Marquette, a joint venture. The project has been valued at between $350 million and $390 million. Clark Construction Group LLC, 7500 Old Georgetown Rd., Bethesda, Md. 20814. DR#06-00872302.

North Carolina The Fred Smith Co. has started constructing a railroad bridge to carry rail traffic over Morrisville Parkway in Morrisville. In addition, the project includes realigning 1.5 miles of railroad curves between Morrisville Carpenter Road and Cary Parkway. The North Carolina Dept. of Transportation is the owner. Valued at $13.6 million, the project is expected to be completed by November 2016. Fred Smith Co., Attn: Mike Sedlock, Senior Estimator, 6105 Chapel Hill Rd., Raleigh, 27622. DR#13-00680508.

Oregon Walsh Construction Co. has started building the Lloyd District Commons, a multifamily residential development, located in Portland. The project entails the construction of a six-story, 196,000-sq-ft building, which will contain 186 rental apartments and 190 parking spaces. Further, the building will contain 3,500 sq ft of streetlevel retail space. The project owner is the AFL-CIO Building Investment Trust. The project's value has been estimated at $45 million. Walsh Construction Co., Attn: Tom Stiehl, Project Manager, 2905 S.W. First Ave., Portland, 97201. DR#12-00548139.

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Pulse: Project News From McGraw-Hill Construction's Dodge

A construction project office and a model hotel room for the Third Ward Kimpton hotel project is being built at 311 E. Chicago St., across the street from the hotel site.

Last year San Francisco-based Kimpton Hotels & Resorts announced that HKS Holdings LLC plans to develop an eight-story, 158-room Kimpton hotel northeast of Broadway and Chicago Street in the Third Ward. Chicago Street Holdings LLC bought the vacant 0.4-acre site for the project for $2 million, according to state records.

Milwaukee-based KBS Construction Inc. recently pulled a building permit from the city to do a $386,444 renovation of 4,900 square feet of space on the second floor of the building at 311 E. Chicago St. for a construction project office and a model hotel room for the Kimpton project.

Construction for the hotel itself is expected to begin by the end of this year and be complete in the spring of 2016.

A spokeswoman for Kimpton did not return a phone call seeking comment.

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Construction office, model hotel room to be built for Kimpton project

Demand for top-quality workspace in Phnom Penh is increasing, so much so that property firm Knight Frank has labelled the capital as the fastest-growing city for rented prime office space in the entire Asia Pacific region.

The firms June 3 quarterly report, which marks the first time Phnom Penh has been included in the study, shows that monthly prime office rent prices in the capital reached more than $27 per square metre (after services, taxes and charges) in the first quarter of this year.

The figure represents a jump of 18 per cent compared with the first quarter in 2013 the highest of the 20 nations included in the report.

Tokyo and Singapore, two of the worlds largest business centres, recorded a 6.2 per cent and a 3.6 per cent increase respectively in office space rentals.

Vacancy rates in the Phnom Penhs prime office market, meanwhile, dropped 5.5 per cent during the first quarter of 2014, according to the Knight Frank report.

Ross Wheble, the country manager at Knight Frank, said the only two prime offices in the city included in the analysis Canadia Tower and Phnom Penh Tower provide more than 40,000 square metres of rental space.

The reason for the big increase [in Phnom Penh] is that the two buildings are with occupancy rates of around 93 per cent, he said, adding that total supply of office space in Phnom Penh is currently 183,000 square metres.

So the landlords have been able to [negotiate] higher rents due to the limited supply of prime office space.

Wheble said with ASEAN integration due in 2015, more and more international companies would be scouring the Kingdoms capital for Grade-A office space.

Prime office space is graded by a number of factors, principally location, but also according to the quality of the construction and the amenities the building offers, such as parking, maintenance and office management.

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Supply drives office rentals to highest in region

An iconic San Francisco office property in the heart of the financial district is poised for a makeover as surging technology firms squeezed out of the popular South of Market area migrate to other neighborhoods.

The complex at 555 California St., once Bank of America Corp.s world headquarters and the citys biggest office building, has about 200,000 square feet (18,600 square meters) available for the first time since its 1969 opening, said Bill Cumbelich, the listing broker at CBRE Group Inc. New York-based Vornado Realty Trust (VNO) has hired an architect for a revamp of the property and is seeking more technology tenants following leases with Microsoft Corp. and Supercell Oy.

Were introducing the location to tech and entrepreneurs who never thought of working here, Cumbelich said as he showed off Clash of Clans game maker Supercells penthouse office on the 52nd floor, above where Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), KKR & Co. (KKR) and Morgan Stanley (MS) lease space. Every building needs a tech strategy.

San Francisco, the best-performing U.S. office market, has absorbed hundreds of software, mobile-application and data-storage tenants since 2010, with many clustering in the converted warehouses and brick buildings of South of Market, or SOMA. Thats forced newer and expanding firms to go where space is more plentiful. Towers under development just outside SOMA have attracted some of the spillover, heightening the challenges for landlords with vacancies farther from the technology hub.

Citywide, technology firms led four years of record leasing that pushed San Franciscos office occupancy to an all-time high of 70 million square feet in the first quarter, according to CBRE. SOMAs 5 percent vacancy rate and 844,000 square feet of available space compared with 7.4 percent and 3.1 million square feet in the financial district, about 10 blocks to the north.

Online retailer Stitch Fix Inc. and Credit Karma Inc., a credit-tracking service, both leased space last month in Union Square, the citys marquee shopping district.

Technology demand is so fierce that medical-device maker Invuity Inc. lost out on potential office leases four times in the past two years to software and social-media firms willing to pay more or complete deals with fewer contingencies, Chief Executive Officer Philip Sawyer said. Job growth and venture funding of startups has depleted the supply of coveted workspaces with horizontal layouts, high ceilings and large, open floors, he said in a telephone interview.

Our competition was well-funded, Sawyer said. You have to move quickly because the environment is so hot.

Invuity finally found offices in Potrero Hill, south of SOMA, in a building thats also home to First Look Media Inc., a news organization backed by EBay Inc. founder Pierre Omidyar. Invuity last month leased 38,000 square feet, triple its former space in SOMA, according to Sawyer.

San Franciscos prime office rents jumped 81 percent since 2011, the biggest advance of any U.S. market and almost four times the 18 percent gain for second-place Bellevue, Washington, another technology-driven city, according to a report by brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle Inc.

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Manhattan is poised to add the most office space in any three-year period since 1990 as projects including buildings at Hudson Yards and the World Trade Center site are completed, the New York Building Congress said.

The borough, home to the largest U.S. office market, probably will add 9 million square feet (836,000 square meters) of office space at nine development sites from last year through 2015, according to the organization, which promotes construction in the New York City area. An additional 10 million square feet at six buildings is likely to become available from 2016 through 2018, the group said in a statement today.

Its a vote of confidence in the market, which we think is long overdue, Richard T. Anderson, president of the New York Building Congress, said in a telephone interview. As a global center of finance and office-related functions, the city needs to regenerate its office space.

Office-using jobs in New York City last year surpassed the 1.8 million mark for the first time, an increase in demand thats helping support the construction boom, the group said. The estimates through 2018 include planned towers at 2 and 3 World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, where office leasing has exceeded the five-year average in each of the past 12 quarters, real estate brokerage CBRE Group Inc. (CBG) said in an April report.

A total of 24.4 million square feet of new office space is expected to be built from 2010 through 2019, more than the 19.4 million square feet added from 2000 through 2009 and the 10.7 million square feet delivered in the 1990s, the Building Congress said. This decades total will be about half of the 49 million square feet completed in the 1980s, the group said.

Filling the added office space may be a challenge, with slowing job growth in office-related industries including finance, insurance and law, Anderson said. Also, the amount of space occupied by each Manhattan office worker is dropping to about 200 square feet per worker in newly built and renovated buildings from 250 square feet, a sign of cost-cutting by employers, according to the Building Congress.

Renovation remains the dominant source of office construction, making up 70 percent of development spending, the group said.

Lower Mahattans 3 World Trade Center is stalled at eight stories while government officials and developer Larry Silverstein work on a plan to finance the 80-story tower. He is seeking an anchor tenant to justify the construction of 2 World Trade Center.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jonathan LaMantia in New York at jlamantia1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kara Wetzel at kwetzel@bloomberg.net Daniel Taub, Christine Maurus

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Manhattan to Add Most Office Space Since 90 Over 3 Years

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Parisi made his pitch on a dead-end street at Sylvan and Van Nostrand avenues, just a few feet away from where LG plans to build its North American headquarters.

A rendering of the proposed LG building in Englewood Cliffs.

The mayor of Englewood Cliffs said Tuesday he would push for more-restrictive height limits on future development along the Palisades but only if a compromise can be found to end the bitter, protracted dispute over plans by LG Electronics USA to build a 143-foot-tall office building that, critics say, will loom over the historic cliffs.

The pitch by Mayor Joseph Parisi Jr., which included a call for LGs opponents to try to reach a middle ground with the company so the project can go forward, was characterized by one leading environmentalist as the first real positive step to finding a solution.

Im urging all the parties with different views to come to the table and compromise, Parisi said at a press conference Tuesday morning, singling out the projects opponents in his call for the two sides to hash out an agreement over the proposed construction, which Parisi said would provide significant economic benefits for the entire state.

Time is of the essence, Parisi said. I fear if a fair compromise is not reached, LG will leave the state.

Parisi who made his statement just feet from where LG has planned to build its new North American headquarters at 111 Sylvan Ave. was joined by LGs legal counsel, Nicholas Sekas, and by Councilman Ed Aversa, who has expressed concern over the height of the building. Parisi said he decided to go public with his plea after LG officials indicated they were willing to talk with the other side the result, he said, of some prodding on his part.

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Englewood Cliffs mayor calls on opponents of LG Electronics headquarters to reach compromise

FILE - In this July 21, 2012 file photo, Chinese people chat in front of an administration office building for the Xisha, Nansha, Zhongsha islands on Yongxing Island, the government seat of Sansha City off the south China's Hainan province. China is building a school on the remote island in the South China Sea to serve the children of military personnel and others, deepening the facilities in the city it created in its campaign to claim the world's most disputed waters. (AP Photo/File) CHINA OUT

BEIJING (AP) The Philippines said Monday it would propose a moratorium on construction in the South China Sea, two days after China began building a school on a rugged outpost it created to strengthen its claims to disputed waters.

Philippine Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario said he will propose that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations call for a moratorium a move that China is likely to ignore or dismiss.

"I think we would use the international community to step up and to say that we need to manage the tensions in the South China Sea before it gets out of hand," del Rosario said.

China began building a school on the largest island in the disputed Paracel chain to serve the children of military personnel and others on Saturday, two years after it established a city there to administer hundreds of thousands of square kilometers (miles) of water where it wants to strengthen its control over potentially oil-rich islands that are also claimed by other Asian nations.

The island, known as Yongxing Island and Woody Island, is 350 kilometers (220 miles) south of China's southernmost province. Vietnam also claims the Paracel chain.

Del Rosario told ABS-CBN News that China is accelerating its "expansion agenda" in the South China Sea to get it completed before ASEAN countries and China draw up a code of conduct that sets rules to prevent incidents in the South China Sea.

He said a suggestion from Danny Russel, the U.S. top diplomat in East Asia, for a freeze in activities which escalate tensions in the area while a code of conduct is being worked out is "a reasonable approach" and one "I would like to initiate."

When China created Sansha city on Yongxing Island in July 2012, the outpost had a post office, bank, supermarket, hospital and a population of about 1,000. By December, it had a permanent population of 1,443, which can sometimes swell by 2,000, according to the Sansha government.

Now it has an airport, hotel, library, five main roads, cellphone coverage and a 24-hour satellite TV station, according to the government. It also has its own supply ship that brings in food, water, construction materials and people.

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Philippines against South China Sea constructions