COEUR d’ALENE — In a 10-acre woodland near two of the city’s busiest streets, Barney Higbee knocked down trees this week and kicked up dust.

The forest of ponderosa pine where Higbee worked as part of a construction project west of Ramsey Road and south of Kathleen Avenue is the building site for an interagency complex that will house the Idaho Panhandle Forest supervisor’s office, a Panhandle hotshot firefighting crew, dispatch center, BLM field and district offices and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service headquarters.

The three-phase project, slated for completion around 2021, has been in the planning stage for several years and is meant, in part, to save the Forest Service up to $9.5 million, according to a Forest Service press release.

Higbee, of Cannon Hill Construction, is part of a clearing crew that started work on the west side of the project removing trees in the pocket of woods near the entrance of the Forest Service nursery along the Prairie Trail.

The first phase of the $16.5 million project includes preparing the site for construction of a 27,000-square-foot warehouse, employee and visitor parking lots, as well as a main building and entrance near the existing Prairie Trail crossing, said Kim Benson, senior project manager of NNAC Construction of Coeur d’Alene.

While the city of Coeur d’Alene reviews the plans for the building permit — two rolls of schematics, architectural drawings and site details of more than 1,000 pages — Benson said crews will remove trees and put up a chain-link fence around the perimeter.

The five-year project is meant to consolidate three federal agencies at one location, said Shoshana Cooper of the Forest Service. One of the issues prompting the change was the stiff lease paid at their present locations. The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management pay a Montana company more than $1 million annually to lease a complex on the 3500 block of Schreiber Way. In addition, the USFWS office will move from its offices in the Spokane Valley to the new location when the facility is completed.

“Their work is in Idaho,” she said.

The complex will also house a multi-agency dispatch center, including wildfire dispatch services that are now located at a Forest Service facility at the Coeur d’Alene airport.

“They have outgrown that space,” Cooper said.

The project’s first phase includes site development, laying down underground utilities and pouring a foundation and slab for part of the warehouse. The second phase will include a warehouse addition. Parking lots and shoring up the entrance to the complex is part of the first two phases, Benson said.

Plans for the project include adding a traffic light at the present location of the Prairie Trail light, but the city has not approved plans for the light. The present light is activated by pedestrians.

“We are going to have more than 200 employees coming in and out of that area,” Benson said.

Nursery employees will also use the new exit.

Work at the site, which lies adjacent to the Coeur d’Alene Golf Course neighborhoods, usually starts around 7 in the morning and ends around 6 p.m.

Higbee used a chain saw to sever root wads from the pine trees, and a Caterpillar backhoe to knock down the trees. Pushing over the trees with the bucket of his machine is more efficient than sawing them down and removing the stumps later, he said.

“It’s a process,” he said.