Duro-Last's 2025 Metal Roofing Awardee: Billmans Cool Roofing Co.

By Emma Peterson. 

This award-winning project secured a long-term, high-performance roofing system for the U.S. Coast Guard’s largest West Coast training center. 

Just an hour North of San Francisco, California sits Petaluma, a picturesque town nestled between the rolling hills of wine country and the majesty of the Pacific Ocean. And in addition to being home to more than 50,000 people, Petaluma is the home of the Coast Guard’s largest West Coast Training Center.  

At Training Center Petaluma, Coast Guard cadets are trained to grow into the “latest chefs, medics, storekeepers, yeoman, information systems technicians, electronics technicians and operations specialists.” Training Center Petaluma is also home of the Coast Guard Leadership Development Center’s Chief Petty Officer Academy. With this amount of training and development occurring on site, it’s crucial that the facility stays in top operational form, which was the priority of the Coast Guard when they started renovations of Bauer Building 544 in 2023.  

In fact, the performance of the building was so important, the Coast Guard reached out to Duro-Last to run “seam-strength and elongation testing under ASTM D751 to verify performance requirements.” In response, Duro-Last sales representative Joe Bristow built a custom testing machine to evaluate on-site performance. He shared, “I went back to my barn and built a machine to perform the test, and the Duro-Tuff membrane outperformed both the competing product and even its own published data. That machine is now on display at the Duro-Last facility in Grants Pass so other contractors can see what’s possible.”  

With the performance of the roofing material proven, the project moved forward with Billmans Cool Roofing as the installer. Armando Saldana, co-owner of Billmans, recalled, “We love challenges and this one pushed us on every level...It had everything working against it — limited access, multiple contractors, weather delays and three different metal radiuses.” 

Even with all those challenges, it only took 18 months for the Billmans team to complete the roof replacement. The process began with a tear-off to the original concrete deck. From there, crews installed primer, a vapor barrier, Duro-Guard insulation and a DensDeck Prime Roof Board. After all the was secured, the Duro-Tuff 60 mil membrane was adhered. And all of that work was just half of the project! 

For the other half, the Billmans team had to install curved standing seam metal panels across multiple sloped roof sections. As Armando referenced, these panels also required three distinct radiuses – 4 feet, 6 feet and 9 feet. While it was certainly a challenge, the Billmans team rose to meet it, replacing the existing metal and insulation with Duro-Guard ISO, EXCEPTIONAL Metals HT Underlayment and custom metal paneling. 

After that was done, all that was left was to step back and admire the work. And the work was well worth admiring. Armando shared, “This is a completely different building now. Everyone who works here loves how it looks and performs.” And Billmans wasn’t the only one proud of the results; the Duro-Last team was so impressed with the work they awarded the project their 2025 award for metal roofing!  

Do you want to see this project? Check out the video of the award-winning roof on Duro-Last's YouTube channel.