Solution in sight for Washington County facilities

WASHINGTON — County Supervisors appear close to a middle ground between previous plans to move several offices to Orchard Hill, and competing calls from the public to keep local government traffic downtown.

At a work session Monday morning, board members all voiced some level of support for a plan architects called “Option B,” which would relocate public health, IT department and county supervisor work spaces to the campus west of town, but leave the offices of the assessor, auditor, recorder, treasurer and GIS near Washington’s square.

Options A and C, respectively, would have packed more offices into Orchard Hill rather than the county courthouse, or would have moved those offices into the former Federation Bank Building a block east.

The middle-of-the-road option addresses a number of complaints about the original relocation plan and an apparently popular alternative. It keeps the highest-traffic offices downtown, does not require any new property purchases for the county, leaves HACAP’s Orchard Hill office intact and allows some room for growth without additional building.

"The thing I like about Option B is that really the only thing that leaves downtown is the supervisors … and it completely satisfies the number one item on our ARPA list, which is find a permanent home for Public Health in a county building,“ Supervisor Marcus Fedler said. ”What Option B does is it gives (public health) the entirety of that building, and it leaves some space unprogrammed so they potentially have some room in the future.“

Coming in at $2.44 million according to a contractor’s estimate, Option B is also the least expensive of the three plans. Encite Architecture & Design Principal Architect Luke Leyden said Option C at the former Federation Bank was the most expensive, despite a low sale price pitched by the building’s owners.

“In Option C, you’ll see the purchase price of Federation Bank included,” he said. “We also included the renovation costs … based on other similar projects. We also have an additional utility cost and also a maintenance cost. Those are because we’re buying additional square footage that the county doesn’t own today.”

The freed up funds may be used to relocate the Washington County Engineer’s office, according to officials, who said they were skeptical of any renovation price tag that would exceed ARPA dollars by enough to trigger a bond referendum.

Karen Bates Chabal, a Washington business owner and vocal critic of original Orchard Hill relocation designs, said she was cautiously optimistic about the compromise proposal.

“It really would be nice if Federation Bank could be worked into that plan,” she said. “But in terms of not moving those big four offices out of the downtown area to the outskirts of town, this is really progress that I think they addressed, and that makes me happy.”

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The plan is not set in stone. Monday’s meeting was a work session only, with no action planned until the item goes on a regular meeting agenda, expected on June 13.

Supervisors said the draft plans discussed Monday were not final by any means, and several pitched ideas that would move offices between buildings on Orchard Hill or establish uses for otherwise unallocated space.

Chief among those were calls to keep the Emergency Operations Center and other large meeting rooms separate, even though the EOC goes unused for most hours of most days.

While architects said supervisor meetings could be held in the large room with minimal disruption to the department, Washington County Emergency Management Coordinator Marissa Reisen said that was a bad idea.

"It’s in a restricted-access facility, which means the public should not be in there (because) we’ve got dispatch in there, we don’t want people wandering around,“ she said in an interview after the work session. ”And the assumption that in a disaster, if we are using the EOC, that there wouldn’t be board meetings, is flat-out wrong. Because there’s likely decisions that would have to be made in a public meeting to approve some of the actions that we might have to take.“

Supervisors said they would likely instruct architects to plan a meeting and conference area for an unassigned room instead.

"We’re looking at all the plans, the drawings and everything else, to try to shoot holes in them,“ Supervisor Jack Seward Jr. said. ”That’s the best defense. You plan, or at least, you’re thinking about, what’s the worst case scenario and how it’s going to work out.“

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com