Quiet, please.
All right, everybody. My watch says it's four o'clock, so let's go ahead and call
to order today's meeting of-- today's work session of the
Corvallis City Council.
One big topic for today, so let's just get to it and take up all our time.
Our facility investments, police and civic campus options.
Why don't you go ahead and hand it over to-
I'm going to hand it back.
Oh, okay.
Yeah. I'll just kick it off with some comments just to
provide some
perspective and background as we reenter this conversation,
and then I'll turn it over
to the smart people in the room, our architects and
Mary.
As we've talked
many times before, Corvallis has largely ignored our
facilities
for
decades.
And we have seen some recent progress and wins in that
we remodeled Fire Station 2, we remodeled Fire Station 3 with
the federal ARPA funds, and in several months we'll be
breaking ground on park maintenance facilities.
So those certainly are exciting things.
But we continue to push our existing facilities
to a breaking point, and there truly are
impacts to staff, operational impacts.
You see quite a few staff in the audience because
this is an issue that is
very important to all of us.
And as I was
thinking about that and what we've done over these decades, I really
do think Corvallis, in the way we've balanced our budget,
we've expanded services at the cost of not investing
in our facilities.
We've
created this false narrative or expectation that you don't need
to invest in facilities. Where if we had been
regularly investing, we would've been taking out bonds, we would have
debt,
or we would've been putting money aside for these facilities,
and yet we
haven't done that.
And yet investing in facilities, civic facilities, is really the
norm. Most communities do this
on a regular basis.
And you don't have to look very far.
You look to our neighbors in Albany.
They have what I'll call a newish city hall.
It's pushing 30 years now, but that's a purpose-built facility that is
serving them well.
They have a brand-new police station, a brand-new
downtown fire station. They have two
satellite fire stations that are relatively new.
They purchased a building and repurposed it into an expanded library.
So again, you see that investment from our neighbors right there.
You go north of us,
Monmouth, just a couple of years ago, opened up a brand-new
purpose-built city hall.
Monmouth's neighbor, Independence, years before Monmouth,
built a civic center that houses their city
administration and their police department.
And then interestingly, my in-laws, they live out in Scio.
I don't know if any of you have been to Scio.
It's a town of about 1,000 people,
and I've had to be out there a little more frequently because my in-laws are
requiring a little more attention.
And
I've seen recently they are building from the ground up a purpose-built
city hall. So big or small, communities do
invest in their civic
buildings and facilities.
And then if you think about even private companies, they are
profit-driven, so they're generally not going to do something if there's not a
return on investment.
And yet they do invest in not just factories, but other
facilities, office buildings and things, because they know there is a return on
investment.
They know that in that it helps attract and
retain high-quality staff, something certainly we want to
do. It creates an environment where there's collaboration,
where the staff feel valued,
where they feel safe, comfortable.
All those things leverage this return on investment of
effectiveness, efficiency.
So I think we can take some notes from the private sector that there is
a return on these investments, truly,
in how we operate.
And nothing in our plans comes close to
a private company's campus or
facilities.
But I do think our staff should be able to expect that they can
come to work in a place that is safe,
that is comfortable,
that's functional,
that's equitable,
so they feel valued, and that they can do their work well, that they can
collaborate and communicate well.
So well-functioning facilities are a foundational
aspect
of a high-performing organization.
And it's interesting, as
over the years that I've been here, we've brought forward different master plans.
You think of a water master plan, the wastewater master plan,
and I know council understands, the community understands we need to
invest in that infrastructure.
And those are expensive. Water treatment plant, wastewater treatment plant.
We have to invest in those. Why? Because the community's growing, and
so those facilities have to accommodate that
growth. Environmental regulations
change, and so those plants need to
accommodate that. There's a parallel.
It's directly the same with our buildings that house our staffAs our
community grows, we've added staff.
We need to accommodate those staff.
And as the workforce evolves, we need to accommodate that
new environment
with the evolved staffing that we have.
So
our buildings and facilities are no different than what we see in our
wastewater treatment plants.
And in fact,
we do have a facilities master plan.
This was adopted by the council in January of
2022. It's our citywide facilities
strategy. So it is a master plan. And while
today we're talking about the civic campus and the police facilities,
there are many more facilities yet that we need to address.
And I want you to keep that in mind as we move forward in the months ahead, when
we start talking about funding and how we might
fund facility projects. And then
lastly, I think it's good to remind ourselves
that really at the heart, at the very beginning of our
conversations and planning for civic campus and police station, was
this idea that this is not just about staff space, it's
not just about office space,
but it truly is an opportunity to make a community
space. It's really a
once in a lifetime opportunity to create something downtown.
And I think it's exciting,
kind of that refocus on downtown that the community has had and
how those conversations are developing, how projects are
moving forward.
And I do want to remind everyone that
the beginning, the driver, the impetus for this focus on downtown
was actually when we brought civic campus and police station
project forward years ago. That's what really kind of kicked that
off.
So I do think these projects specifically
can have a huge impact far outside
just how they impact the way the city delivers services.
As we move forward today, we are not seeking a decision from
the council. And in fact, you wouldn't be able to provide a
well-reasoned or well-informed decision today because we haven't talked
about the revenue side, how we might pay for that, and what
might be possible.
So this really is to
respond to the resolution that the council passed to bring
forward this option and
implications of moving forward in different ways with these facilities, together or
separate.
So that's what we'll work towards today and provide.
And it's important to keep this information
in mind as we move forward in May and June,
and if it goes on a month or two beyond that, and we start
making decisions about the facilities and the funding.
This is really foundational for that, for you, hopefully also
for the community too.
So with that, I'll be turning it over.
I think Ian, you're going to kick us off.
Ian is going to lead us through a section.
Mary's going to talk about sustainable decision-making.
I think the best way to handle this is hold your questions till
Ian's done, we'll open it up. Mary's done, and then once we're done with
everything,
hopefully we'll have some good conversation and general questions
at the end.
Any questions before I hand it over to Ian?
Okay. Good.
All right.
And Ian, you can introduce yourself and John.
Good afternoon, council. Great to see many of you again.
For those of you who I haven't met before,
my name is Ian Gelber. I'm a partner with FFA Architecture and Interiors of
Portland. We're a 70-year-old practice that has been in
pretty much that entire time.
Most of our work is focused on public facilities like
the facilities that you're considering today.
I'm joined here today with John Peet, who is our project manager.
He's here to make sure that I don't say anything that I wasn't supposed to say or
to actually correct me if I get something wrong.
For most of my 28-year career, I have been focused
on public facilities. Within the last 10, my
focus has been helping
municipalities like yours get from conversations like
today to opening day.
Yeah.
And all the various ways that those types of things happen.
With that, we're going to dive in.
So we have here. We've organized this in such a
way to reset the stage. It's been
a little over a year or more since we've had a chance to, since
council made the decision about which vision that they wanted to move forward with.
So we want to reintroduce that, particularly for council members who weren't a part
of those conversations.
And then the bulk of the conversation is really about how these projects get
implemented. And we'll go through a series of scenarios and talk
about the pros and cons and what the risks might be to full
implementation. And then lastly, as Mark mentioned, then there's the
conversation about what the upcoming process.
So resetting the stage.
This endeavor began in 2022 with the master
plan that Mark just mentioned.
And so within that
effort, we had tasks of assessing the different
facilities that are in Corvallis's facility portfolio.
And so we looked at a range of different thingsThis gets at
what Mark talked about initially, which is that if the red
line represents the population growth of the city
of Corvallis
up until, I think about
a little past 2020.
Excuse me. And that the projected growth is to continue to
about 75,000 by 2040.
The dark blue represents the amount of square footage in your existing facilities.
Mm-hmm.
And you start to see where that gap has
occurred over time, where your facility investment, just
from a space needs, hasn't kept up with your population growth.
And then as that dashed line moves past, that is the
expected growth that's to happen.
And so there's a risk that you sort of get deeper in the hole much quickly
if you don't take the steps in some ways in the
reasonable future.
In addition to looking at space needs, and we'll talk a little bit about space
needs again, we were responsible for doing ranking the
current facilities relative to their condition.
And we've got four buckets. We have administrative, which
includes
city administration, city hall,
HR, everything that is centered around the management of the
city. We have operations, that includes public works and parks
maintenance, and then we have public safety, which is police
as well as fire. And then public-facing functions that are
library, the pool, theater,
they fall in that last.
At the bottom you see our sort of rating scale.
Everything from poor, which is one or the dark red, to
green, which is good.
So the dark red that you see in operations, that's parks maintenance.
And if you've ever toured parks maintenance facility, I don't think that's
arguable.
If you look at public safety, that is the law enforcement building.
And then the green aspects there, or there's a little bit red there
also for city hall.
And then the green aspect is the investments that you've already done with the fire
station work that you've completed.
So this is a representation of those space needs with those
same buckets, the administrative, the operations, the public safety, and public
facing.
The light gray represents your current square footage.
The dark red represents to meet today's current needs,
how much more square footage you would need.
And then to the bluish cyan color
represents if you're projecting that growth out to
2040, how much additional space you would need on top of what you have
today.
I will say that in this process of evaluation of the
city facilities, we looked at everything.
We went through 10 departments,
and 17 facilities overall. John's going to correct me if I get that wrong.
Thanks.
Sure.
As part of that process, we established guiding principles
for the arc of what we're talking about, both in that facility
assessment and moving forward into concept design.
All of those guiding principles came from the work that council
had already done in a series of policy documents.
So if you remember, we had a matrix that we presented last
time that showed
all the things they were doing and how they tied back to specific policy decisions
the council had made over time. And so it just reinforced the
priorities that council had,
and we felt like it was a good way to kind of evaluate the steps that we were
taking.
So let's talk about the decision that council made back
in November of 2024.
We presented multiple scenarios about how
Civic Campus and the police station
could be configured around Madison.
These were really the sites that we focused on.
This was land that the city either owned or was in the process of owning,
and we felt like this was the right place with
other priorities around Madison Avenue.
Most of the other versions that we talked about with you involved
keeping the existing city hall or not.
This was the ultimate vision that council decided, and I'm going to walk through
quickly just the different categories,
why they were ranked the way that they were.
So in the white bars that you see, anything on the left
where it has a little negative were considered less desirable
relative to those guiding principles.
Anything where it goes all the way to the right where the positive is,
felt like they were meeting guiding principles much better.
So
beginning with the first one, from a functional and operation standpoint,
these projects were bringing everybody together and consolidating them
around
the potential plaza area on Madison.
And that notion of synergies across
city departments was seen as a positive, versus being
distributed between the existing city hall, this
building.
Yeah.
Thanks.
This was seen as a way to
create a higher degree of synergy and efficiency.
Carbon impact.
We spent a lot of time talking about carbon.
When you are
evaluating carbon, you're looking at carbon from two perspectives.
One is the embodied carbon, which from an architectural standpoint, it's what
it takes to make the building, to build the building.
And then you're talking about operational carbon, which is how much it takes to
run the facility from an energy perspective.
The carbon impact here was less
over-Largely because the embodied
carbon
of the existing city hall was taken out of the equation.
The two points I would have around that are that
the facilities that we're proposing for
would be as low carbon as we can
possibly make within the technology that we have now, which is
using things like mass timber, looking at other systems to look
at decreasing the embodied carbon.
Or sorry, from the beginning of the construction.
The operational carbon is about creating facilities that are incredibly
efficient.
I think Mary's going to share some graphs at the end of the presentation.
We'll talk about the actual energies- ... at city hall.
And as an architect, I will tell you that it's staggering.
I haven't seen a figure like that before.
But not to thunder,
it is impressive.
From a resiliency standpoint,
we're looking at as much resilience as we can.
When you are doing a police station, you have to meet
a seismic level or an earthquake resistance level of what's called Level 4.
That means that in the event of an earthquake,
everyone leaves the building during the earthquake, and the police can go right
back in and continue operation because they need to.
With the civic campus,
we decided that we were going to aim for Level 3,
which enabled everyone to get out of the building safely, which is required by
code. But the building is not a throwaway when you're done.
So that your investment in facility right now is one
that survives an earthquake, needs some repairs, but it's not we're
scraping the site kind of condition.
By comparison, the current city hall has had seismic
upgrades, but it is to a Level 2, which means that everybody gets out
safely, but the building is done. There's no repairing.
So keeping that in mind in terms of the overall resilience.
And then resilience is not just about earthquake resistance, it's
also about energy performance and the opportunities for solar
panels and battery systems and all of that.
This system gave the most opportunity for that.
Financial stewardship. There's a lot of ways to look at budget and
financial stewardship. We took the approach of this is a way to
meet the goals that we had outlined for the least amount of long-term costs.
And so of the options that we were presenting, this option actually comes with
this.
From an accessibility standpoint, when we initially started the
concept design, looking at the
civic campus in particular, the existing city hall has
accessibility challenges. It is designed in a very traditional manner, which means
the first floor is, if I remember correctly, about seven feet up.
That represents a pretty significant barrier for anybody who's in a wheelchair.
Currently, I'm sure as you all know, if you're using a wheelchair to go
into city hall, you have to go through the back door, find your way to an elevator,
and come up midway through the building.
If city halls are intended to welcome every resident
in the most
thoughtful and compassionate, caring way, the existing building really
doesn't.
It's not to say that we didn't explore ways to solve that problem, but they came
at significant expense or didn't really meet the intent.
Lastly, we talked about the potential community amenity that
these projects could create.
And that's really about resident engagement.
Right.
And so the plaza existed in most of the options, and that's a
fantastic opportunity for civic events, and it goes a long
way towards bringing people downtown, which we'll talk about later when we talk
about downtown vitality. But this option
allowed for the most potential public meeting
space within the civic campus lot.
The other options that we presented at the time were more about just
administration or trying to have public meeting space
in the existing city hall only. Again, back to that notion of accessible.
Go ahead and move forward at that point, unless there's any comments on it.
Okay, so
we're going to take a little bit of time with this graphic.
We showed it to you back in November of 2024.
But this represents pretty much the fundamental challenge in
terms of creating public facilities, or frankly, any
facility from a time and construction standpoint.
So what this graphic represents is the time scale
from left to right, beginning from 1980 to
2060.
And what it is here to show you is the cost or impact of
escalation, specifically construction escalation, over
time.
So we made a couple of modifications
to this diagram since we last showed it to you.
Before I get to that, let me explain the diagram a little bit.
From the orange dot in the middle that represents today, moving backward
in time, the numbers that are provided are
using what is called the Engineer News Record.
Basically, they track escalation over time.
So it's the actual escalation for construction that has
happened over that time. From the orange dot to
the right, that represents 6% of escalation
per year, which is the current going rate.
When you talk to a contractor or a construction estimator,
that's the number that they use when they're trying to figure out how much a
project is going to cost in the future.
So the change that we made is that when
we first presented this to you, we didn't know which option council was going to
choose. So we just picked a number, and it was 200 million, and that was
our-Baseline number to show how the escalation
is going to change. We've now changed the numbers to reflect
the option that we chose and the cost of what that said.
The other thing that we have done is that the
large blue dot in the middle that says 2027,
if we had started the project
December of 2024, the bid date for
construction would have been in 2027, and the cost of the
project would have been
188. The
orange dot next to it represents the escalation that's
going to happen for us to actually get the project if we started
today. And I want to pause here just for a second.
And Mark, we chose that 2029 number both from
what the design team and construction team needs, but also potential
funding timeline. Is that correct?
That's correct.
Great.
So can I just clarify?
Yes, please.
The 2029, when Ian says starting today, he doesn't mean
starting construction today.
Yeah.
He means starting the process of full design to construction documents today.
Yes. Thanks, Mary. So the giant orange dot in the middle that says
today is if we bid the project today, which of course we
can't because we need time to design.
The last thing I want to point out is the small three dots to the left
represent the past opportunities that the city has
had to
do facilities
master plans.
I bring this every meeting.
Other times, the city has stepped up to the line and stepped away.
And so considering the amount of money that you're considering
spending, that's how much that same money would've been back in
1988.
Sorry.
2015.
The last comment I'll make is that because escalation is moving
at 6% per year, that means 5% per month.
And so when you look at the lower orange dot for 2029, it's
1.05 million per month of escalation passed.
You mean point.
Yeah, point. 0.5.
0.5.
I
said 5%. Sorry.
That would be very expensive.
My fault. It's 0.5. But it still represents a really
significant number.
Can I ask a question-
Yes, please
... before we move on from that?
Yes.
Do you feel like the current environment will make that number
change potentially? Or is this average over time through all these
different things, and so it's not likely to change much, or what?
It's a crystal ball.
Yeah.
What I will tell you is that there was another graph that we didn't bring, I
apologize, but it shows the arc of the escalation
from when the Engineering News-Record started calculating it from,
I'm going to get this wrong, it's either 1912 or 1915. Right?
And there's only two times that the number went negative.
Mm-hmm.
Once was the Great Recession
and once was the Great Depression.
Mm-hmm.
As much as you want negative escalation for your project, there
are other consequences-
Sure
... on those scenarios.
We're in a moment of
high volatility, right? And so I
think that
we're holding at 6%, but you can hit a
pocket of time relative to the market where you have spikes.
Okay.
A good example is the last five weeks or so,
with the energy volatility that we've had.
That's kind of what I was getting at.
Yes.
Yeah.
Right. So there's always risk.
Okay.
The fundamental rule is it never goes down.
It may flat line a little bit, but it doesn't go down.
Okay.
I want to pause for questions here because I think this is central to
a lot of the scenarios that we're talking about.
Is there anything unclear about this overall idea about the escalation?
Yeah. Ian, just a quick question. The diagram you showed had
civic campus on the south side and police on the north, and we
talked about flipping that.
Mm-hmm.
I suspect that does not materially affect the cost.
But is that a bad assumption or an okay one?
No, I think that's an okay assumption.
Okay.
I
will get to some benefits. I guess it doesn't matter.
You sure?
Yeah. Thank you.
Okay.
Yeah, the original plan that was presented to us was the other way around, and the
council said would it make more sense to have city hall on the south side for, I
think, for sun and
energy.
For sun and one of the options included a future
parking garage, which we didn't go with.
But that was part of the rationale.
Okay.
Mm-hmm. Other thoughts or questions? Yeah.
The thing not shown on this slide is the change in our
ability to pay for these things.
Sure.
I'm
well aware of the fact that revenue
hasn't gone up 6% a
year or so.
Right.
It's separating farther.
Yeah.
But still, that's also not shown, and so that creates
another factor-
Yes
... and it happens over time.
Yeah. And there's another point, and I'll bring it up later, is
that if the construction escalation is at
6% average,
consumer price index is only at 2.8 or between three and
four normally. So public perception of what something
should cost is out of whack because the escalation is
moving at double the rate.
For construction.
Yeah.
And so when you talk about talking to the community about funding,
inherently everyone thinks that construction costs way too much because it
doesn't match their day-to-day inflation over time.
So I'll bring that up
again.Okay. I'm going to go ahead and move
forward. We can come back to this diagram if it's helpful.
Okay. So we have a series of implementation strategies.
And we're going to start with
the common impacts of the whole vision being
finished. And that is both the civic campus
and the police station have been built on Madison with a plaza.
And so when that is complete, whenever,
whatever sort of sequence that happens,
we've established the 100-year Madison Avenue vision to move a central civic hub
downtown. For those of you who don't know, it has been a 100-year
vision to make Madison a major pedestrian thoroughfare
from the gates of campus down to the river, and that the
civic heart of the city is located at the Mocade Lawn.
And it's been in different spots, depending on which version of that plan has
existed, but this actually puts it square
on Madison. It also puts it at the gateway position to downtown.
So if someone's coming from campus to the river, the first thing that they hit when
they get to downtown is a civic idea.
The next is that the project contributes to downtown vitality, the daily activity
from employees, visitors, and civic functions.
When we talk about civic functions, you have residents who are coming to this
facility both to seek services, but also to use
the further down point of gathering spaces and
attending civic events.
We maintain public safety and city administration at the center of the community.
We haven't relocated to some other location.
Other communities have found cheaper land outside of city limits, or not
outside city limits, but outside downtown cores.
This keeps it as sort of vital to downtown.
We've created opportunities for public gathering space and civic events in the
downtown core, which again, brings people here, who then when they finish
with that, they go shopping. They go down, grab a bite to eat, grab a cup of
coffee.
One thing that has happened between when we last spoke and now
is that you've had the Downtown Vitality Strategic Task
Force, and they have been looking at what the opportunities are
to bring more vitality to downtown, and I think that's
somewhat timely because I believe these goals were just presented to you recently.
We've sort of gone back and looked at those and seen how these projects sort of
plug into that.
They plug in directly because some of the goals are, "Hey, let's do the
civic campus downtown, let's do the police station downtown."
But there are some that are less tangential or sorry, more tangential than
others.
There's a desire for an economic boost, right?
Keeping the
staff downtown to be able to support businesses during lunch hours and things
like that, both for city hall staff and also
for the police. That's a direct economic
boost.
Also when there are community events, that you're bringing more people
downtown, it's the same thing.
On that topic of economic boost, one of the other goals within the task
force is housing.
Most housing, if not all housing, even
affordable housing, is still driven primarily by private development.
Private development is looking for spaces that are vital,
the old adage of location, location, location-
Mm.
Because it helps them keep their vacancy rates down.
So the more active downtown can be and more desirable to live, the more
likely you can encourage that investment to house.
A lot of the downtown goals also focus
on quality of street experience. What happens with the infrastructure, how do
we improve the sidewalks, the curbs, lighting, all the things that go
along the street scene.
The opportunity to do the plaza first and set the standard
that the rest of the street might follow, I think is a pretty
great opportunity.
The notion of social infrastructure.
If anyone was able to go to the
2022 League of Oregon Cities keynote,
Eric Klinenberg, who is the author of "Palaces for the People."
Mm.
He talks a lot about-
One of my favorite books.
Absolutely. It's great.
He talks a lot about
how we are slowly losing what we call social infrastructure,
and it's really what we call third spaces. Mark, you and I have talked about that.
It's the spaces that people can interact where they don't have to spend a dime,
right? Libraries are one of the last examples of that.
He makes a case in his book and in the keynote that he gave, that not
only are those things nice to have for a community, they're actually
inherently needed within social
resilience. So the example that the book starts out with is, as
Carolyn would probably know, is when there is
a community crisis,
the communities that do the best are when the neighbors go next door and knock on
it and make sure that that person's okay.
We need more opportunities for people to interact, to build relationships,
and that fosters a stronger, more resilient community.
Playing back to our project, notion of the plaza,
notion of the public meeting spaces within City Hall, those are
in direct support of that idea.
Lastly, sustainability, and it dovetails with the final bullet on the slide,
is that
the goal for sustainable development downtown, the city has the
opportunity to set the standard with what those projects can be,
both in terms of quality, energy efficiency, opportunities
for solar panels,
and
just reinforcing that message to private development that may happen in
downtownSo
if those are common to the end result, these are common to
what the implementation looks like, and if there
are delays in time, because that's really what we're
focusing on. So as I mentioned before, we have construction cost
escalation calculated at 6% per year or
0.5 per
month.
To get an apples to apples comparisons along these strategies,
we've used a time scale of eight years between projects if we
phase.
And we've done that for a couple of reasons.
One,
make sure I get this right.
You're probably not going to start the second project until
you've completed the first. So that's at minimum, that's three years there.
You're likely probably going to have another funding conversation once you've
done that. And so that's another year or two.
And so all of a sudden you're five to 10 in your
potential delay. And
it's an arbitrary number to a certain degree.
Council can decide to do whatever they want, but for the purposes of this
evaluation, that's what we've used across the scale.
Depending on how long you delay, there are other
factors that can jeopardize final implementation.
Long delays can overlap council elections,
right? You have an opportunity to work together, to get these projects
done.
It's not to say that a future council won't have similar objectives,
but it's a shift, it's a change, and it's ultimately a
risk to whether something gets fully implemented or not.
Multiple funding asks can lead to voter fatigue depending on what the
funding solutions are. The more times that you go
back, the more difficult the conversation can become.
And I'll talk a little bit about that to get deeper into it.
In any of these options, City Hall staff need to relocate
because fundamentally City Hall is being removed in the
options, and so City Hall staff has to go someplace while that's
happening. The cost and
duration of the relocation is impacted by which option you choose.
In any option where the police station is delayed,
resilient temporary facilities need to be created.
Law enforcement building is in really dire straits, and so
moving the police to a temporary facility has
pretty significant cost implications because a
temporary construction for police requires a lot more
technical construction. They have things like holding cells and evidence
management that just is more expensive to build.
Lastly, over time, building and regulatory code changes
can occur, which can drive costs that you can't
anticipate.
When we were evaluating if both projects are moving
together or they stagger, we've gone and talked to
contractors to understand what the impacts and
efficiencies might be for the benefits going
together or independently.
So if projects move together, a single project has less startup
mobilization and shutdown costs.
What that means is every time a project starts up, they need to bring in the job
trailer, they need to get crews on board.
There are costs inherent to that. And they're
not insignificant, but they're worth sort of mentioning.
Larger projects have a greater economy of scale.
You get greater efficiencies over a larger project than if you have smaller
or two smaller.
The process of procuring, managing
subcontractors on a job, if you only have to do it once, it's easier.
If you have a bigger project, you can move and stagger workflows around.
A single project has greater efficiency, general contractor supervision,
temporary safety and security.
These are the day-to-day management of
relative to security, onsite management,
I should say, because they're ability to share equipment, material staging.
Material staging particular is one on an urban site we have to be pretty
thoughtful about.
Avoid duplicate costs for tapping utilities and doing street right of way work.
If you've completed one project and you've connected to the water main, and all of
a sudden you start the next one, you've got to go dig up the sidewalk and do it
again.
And then lastly, there's only one disruption to the downtown
neighborhood. Projects of these scales are going to impact traffic in
the area,
and contractors are really great about managing noise, but there is
disruption overall.
Okay, so we have four implementation strategies, and I'm going to
walk through the pros and cons of each.
And then at the bottom is
total cost.
So
in the case where we move both projects together,
Civic Campus staff return after a short-term lease.
They're out of downtown for the least amount of time.
Police are able to remain in the law enforcement building while construction is
completed.
You address the two aging facilities simultaneously, reducing the
long-term facility risk of various issues.
Allows shared infrastructure site development efficiencies, as we were just talking
about, between the two projects.
Immediately implements downtown vitality task force goals.
The things that have been just brought to you can come to fruition much
quicker and support downtown faster.
Avoids future construction escalation, which is the topic we were just
talking about.
Allows for a new approach to underground parking garage.
I'll get to that in a second.
And then this is the least total cost to implement.
If you look at the full picture of council vision, this is
the most cost-effective way to get it done.
The con here is that it is the highest initial
capital cost.
So parking. I mentioned here,
allows for new
approach to underground parking.
So initially, when we brought this vision to
council,
because we were designing a public safety building, the biggest challenge to public
safety is they have a lot of vehicles, and they have to find a place to put them.
It can take significant amount of acreage, as John and I both know from working on
lots of public safety buildings, to accommodate their fleets.
And so when we designed the public safety building, initially, we ended up going
two and a half to three floors below grade
to create below grade parkings.
That's not the most expensive effort
overall, and given how tight these sites are,
it's pretty inefficient.
Once you start to ramp down and try to get multiple ramps going down, you eat up a
lot of that square footage. When we realized that we
could potentially have both projects moving in at once, the opportunity is to
do a larger,
shallower parking structure that goes all the way underneath Madison
Avenue and ties Civic Campus together.
You wouldn't do this type of approach piece.
It would cause a level of complexity that would just drive costs up.
And so the benefit here is that you likely have enough
space for the secure parking needs of public safety
folks.
We also have the potential for additional parking that is outside of that secure
zone that could be separate. Whether that's for staff, for the public,
that's all for
you to determine.
But of this implementation option one,
we can sort of potentially pull off this scenario.
And so, this is
basically what that looks like
after everything's done at once, and this is what you get.
Now, a couple of caveats here.
This is not what the buildings will look like.
We haven't designed them yet. Any
design of a public building, once the project moves forward, we work really
hard to do community engagement, to engage the community in how these buildings
should look and feel.
So we needed to provide an idea or a vision to council and
the public just to get a sense of something.
So if you don't like the window pattern, it's okay.
It's not going to be this at the end of the day.
But what you do see here is that potential for these
two projects working together with the plaza space in between
and that further connection on Madison.
This is looking down towards the river and the OB development that's
underway right now.
So implementation strategy number two
says if you build the public station first, and you delay the Civic
Campus. And again, we're talking of a delay just for the point of numbers of
eight.
Whatever council decides at that point is up to you, but eight
years is the benchmark that we're doing this.
That's it.
So the benefits here is that you've dealt with the public safety building first,
which is pretty critical relative to operational
effectiveness for them and resilience for police services.
You have a lower initial capital investment because you're only building one of the
buildings.
You maintain at least one civic anchor while you're
getting these facility needs solved.
It allows the city to phase the major capital investments over time
and improves emergency resilience through getting the 911 facility
into a new building sooner.
The cons are is that your civic vision is only half
realized.
City administration moves out of downtown for an
undetermined amount of time, whether it's eight years or whatever the length of
time this ends up being. They're someplace else,
and the community is going someplace else besides downtown during
that time period.
There's a risk that the full Civic Hub
vision becomes more difficult to achieve because of the delay risks that we
talked about earlier. There's a missed opportunity for
the shared site efficiencies, construction efficiencies that we talked about.
We're now
delaying parts of the Downtown Vitality Task Force goals
because we don't have that civic space that's going to
encourage people to come in.
And lastly,
because city hall staff are
in a lease condition
someplace else, you have higher lease costs.
So the overall cost to implement this one total is
$267 million. It's $116.6
million for the police station when you first build it,
but then because of that escalation, Civic Campus now costs
$151 million to build.
Can I ask a detail question?
Yes, please.
Just because I'm super curious.
Yeah.
You talk about this brilliant idea of having the garage go all the way across.
Sure.
How does building them one at a time affect that?
Because you can
only build half, right?
You don't really have that option anymore.
Okay.
Yeah.I guess the add-on to that is the
secure parking need for the police wouldn't fit in a
one-story parking garage-
... under the PD.
Right.
So they wouldn't have their fleet needs meet K1.
But would it fit under the police and the plaza?
It could potentially.
That's something that would need to be studied.
Mm.
I think the reality of
the plaza's function goes best with the Civic Campus.
And so
even if you, to your point, Council Elmes, if you built
two-thirds of that parking, building that last third gets really challenging
in sort of making those connections to it.
But you believe you would meet the parking
requirements for the police station?
We don't even see. We have to verify that.
Yeah.
So
the new public safety building is built, the street remains the
same.
The idea being that the remaining facilities, the buildings
that we're in, is no longer occupied by city staff.
They've now moved to another location.
You
really don't need these facilities anymore from a city
standpoint.
Whether you decide to try and lease them or something, that's on you.
But having that capability to use that site as staging
and not have to maintain these buildings anymore suggests that you might just
take them down. And so you have a
partially realized vision.
Well, and also just to add to that,
our direction as staff is to construct
the council's direction, which is two buildings at some point in time.
And so by taking the buildings down, you're setting the stage for that to be able
to happen
more efficiently when the time comes for the second building to happen.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Question. Where does the staging occur in just building the police
building?
We could have it on the back, some on the backside of the law
enforcement building or the police station building, but you've got your
transportation hub is there.
It can happen in the plaza, but you're going to be working on
both buildings and then do the plaza last.
It's a question for the contractor overall.
You're not going to obviously impact
6th because of the train going by. You don't want to impact 5th because
it's kind of a major through repair.
It's going to be a difficult site regardless in either option.
I think there is advantage to stage-
Yes
... on the right-hand side there.
Right.
Right where we're sitting here.
Yeah.
Good point.
Yeah.
But then the question arises, if you phase it, where do
you stage for building the second half?
Right.
Whichever building it is that comes first.
Exactly. Now you have a problem.
Yeah. Basically, staging is going to be a problem whatever you do.
Whichever .
So, implementation strategy three is you reverse
that. You do the Civic Campus first, and you
phase the police station.
In this case,
you're reinforcing the civic presence and identity downtown.
Civic staff return to downtown sooner.
It improves administration efficiency and service delivery for the city operations
when they're downtown, closer to where people are.
Supports downtown vitality through daily staff and visitor
activity. Again, more people coming to the building.
Establish as part of the Civic Campus framework,
all of it, and then lower initial capital costs similar
to phasing the police station.
Initial
capital costs.
Initial capital costs. Appreciate that.
The cons here is the police department relocates for an undetermined amount of
time. As we talked about, the longer portion of the building is very
challenging from a resilient standpoint.
The renovation of temporary public safety facility is expensive, as we mentioned.
If you try to move the police someplace temporarily, you're building a lot more
expensive construction to house them in that location.
The full civic hub vision becomes more difficult to achieve because of
the delay
risks that we talked about.
And the civic vision remains incomplete for an extended period
of time. Missed opportunity to strengthen community interaction with public
safety. So as architects who design public
safety facilities,
one of the things that we are often trying to do within municipal police
stations is create opportunities for police to
interact with the public outside of a 911 call.
That is a huge part of relations between residents
and public safety staff.
And anything that we can do that encourages the
police to be walking to shops downtown to grab lunch-
Yeah
... in between shifts, whatever it is that we can do to
normalize interactions there, we look for that opportunity wherever we
can. Because we've paired these two projects together, however they're
implemented, there's a lot of potential for that to happen here.
Question. So this, the cost does include the renovation of the
temporary public-
This does not.
Does not.
Does not. This is just the cost to implement this vision.
Okay.
None of these include any sort of lease, long-term or short-term.
Okay. So I think it's an important point to
relocating
administrative staff temporarily is one cost X, yet
relocating police and building the supporting structure for that
is multiple X.
Yes.
Okay.
Sure.
Are these numbers in
the second number on that, is there anyAttempt to
adjust for inflation. If you assume, obviously money is
not going to be...
Inflation's going to happen.
Right.
So in real dollar terms, when you build the second one,
185 is-
Right
... is current dollars then, and you make no assumptions about
actual inflation-
No
... between now and then.
So the numbers below, the first number in the
parentheses is what it costs to build the Civic Campus in
2029.
Right.
Right. The second number, the 185.9, is the
cost of building the police station in
2037.
37. Yeah.
Which that includes the escalation to 2037.
It includes the 6%
escalation.
Got it.
But it does not include any adjustment to that in the
cost of-
Inflation
... the 2, 3, 4% inflation.
No.
So that's, in a sense, both of these are sort of an
overstatement
of the real cost of money.
I challenge that a little bit.
I mean, Harry's-
Said it a little bit before, I'm not an economist, so I can't
weigh too far into that. But ultimately, as I said before,
you're still outstripping the pace of what the consumer price is.
Right.
Right?
Six. It's that 6% that we talked about before.
Yeah. But
just for clarity,
the 185 includes the 6%. It doesn't
include any adjustment to somebody looking
at that, that inflation has done, is responsible for a piece
of that, so to speak.
That's correct.
Okay.
Right.
Okay.
Well-
And
I recognize, you could make whatever assumption you wanted to make.
Inflation will be 3%, escalated will be 6%,
and so the real increase is something-
Right
... but it's all funny money numbers between here and there.
The clarity there, Paul, is that
if you're trying to gauge what somebody feels that number
is, right?
Right. And I'm not disputing that at all.
Right.
I'm just thinking for,
in terms of actually paying for it in real dollars.
That is the cost that the contractor would say you're going
to pay in 20-
In 20-
2037.
Yeah.
To build that police station.
Heck.
Yeah. Okay.
In eight years, $185 million sounds cheap.
That'd be great news for us.
I think
maybe a slightly different take on that.
Yeah.
The question for me is that,
it would be nice to know, easy enough to
calculate, how much of the 185.9
million was because of the delay.
The escalation.
Yeah, because I think the
common intuition might be, we'll build one now, then
build one later,
and what's the diff?
Sure.
And I think that's the point that I think is important is
that the cost of delay is costing a lot
more than you imagine.
Yes.
Yeah. And I think that it might be useful to highlight the-
Right.
So in this strategy, the $185.9
amount is for the police station.
I know. Right.
So go back to slide strategy two.
That's 116 million if you build it now.
Right.
So the difference between 116, and I've already forgot the other number,
185 is that.
Yeah. I mean, I don't know. It's clean subtraction, but it's fine.
It's close enough. I think that's the point I presume Chair's making.
So-
... for us to get to those numbers,
we took the 116.6 and multiplied it times
6% per year for eight years.
Right.
Which got us to the
185.9.
Yeah.
And so likewise,
in
what we will call current, the police station would cost,
I'm sorry, the Civic Campus would cost-
94
... and in the other scenario.
It would cost 151.
So like 40,
60 something.
Yeah. She's roughly 60,000. 60 million,
sorry.
60 million.
All right. Well, yeah, I mean, it's 6% compounded by a year or so.
It's going to be a big deal.
It's going to be big.
I just think it's good from a communication point of view, because there's an
intuition that
if
I just wait, if I just stay things out, it's going to be better
somehow.
Mm-hmm.
As opposed to
at 6% per year.
8%. What was the number, six?
6%.
For eight years.
Okay. For eight years.
Yeah, it's going to
be a significant
effect every year you wait.
Definitely.
You can't just wait a year. Well, I mean, that's your point.
We can try to wait a year.
Right.
But anyway, I think it's important to call that out.
Yeah. And I think you can look back at that graphic that we showed initially that
shows if we had started in 2027, if we were getting in
2027 for both projects at 188, if we're bidding in
2029 for both projects, it's now 201.
Yeah.
Yeah. So
basically more than double.
So a lot to hear was we were talking about sort of a phased
approach, that there's the cost implication on it, and then
there's the risk to whether or not you're going to have the full vision.
Right.
Because in addition toYou're
building one, and then you're going to come back and you hopefully have a funding
source that the public supports. So as I mentioned
when I started, this is over the last 10 years, I spent a lot of time with
community engagement and working with communities to get to
funding these projects. And obviously I'm not the funding expert, but I'm helping
with messaging, communication, understanding of the
projects, and et cetera.
And so when you're, and we're not saying this is your approach, but if you're
going for a bond, which a lot of communities do,
you're always going to have people who are fantastic supporters of
specific items of any kind and they'll support everything.
Then you have people who are the opposite end of that spectrum who will never pay
for anything.
Right.
And there's a certain percentage always of either end of that spectrum.
In the middle are the people who you're trying to communicate what the need
is and is the cost reasonable.
Right.
What often is the trap
is that people go out for a bond.
There's a number that's put out there, and it doesn't pass.
And I'm not saying this would happen to you, but it's something that's relatively
common. And the community says, "That's just way too expensive."
Now you go back out a year later, and you've somehow
addressed the community's concern.
You've pared that number back, but you've lost a year of buying power.
Mm-hmm.
And so now you can't even build what that original vision is.
We've been working with another community that I won't mention.
They've tried four times to do a public safety book
that includes a fire station and a police. Four times.
Mm.
First time was like $6 million. The last time they tried was
$15 million. The version that we did with them was almost $32 million.
Wow.
And there's other complications within.
But ultimately,
every time you have to go to the community, you're finding those ends of the
spectrum. Trying to find the reasonable argument in the middle.
And every time takes time, energy,
investment of staff or council to
move these projects forward. So when you get to that
eight-year mark that we're talking about here, you're going to go through
that process again, and hopefully you've got the same
support from the community that you did when you did it the first time.
And so there's a risk then.
Okay. So last scenario.
So the
campus will be built,
and same sort of conversation about the
existing building and the
.
One more IP.
And thank you.
Those have been removed for the same reasons.
So the last strategy is that you do nothing right now,
and
you delay both projects to whatever timeframe you
decide. But to keep things apples to apples, we said you delay eight
years. But really, it's unknown.
You don't know what might happen. So the
pros are you don't have any immediate out-of-pocket capital
expenditures.
But the cons are, the biggest one being the construction escalation.
The city abandons downtown for an undetermined amount of time.
The remodeling space for public safety is expensive, like we talked
about.
You now have somewhat of a misalignment with your Downtown Vitality Task
Force goals.
Does not address the long-term facility management.
As a reminder, these were the priority projects.
So all the projects that needed to come behind these ones are also now
frozen.
You have loss of momentum. You've been working on
this topic for significant amount of time.
Other citywide facility strategy projects are further delayed, just mentioned
that. This is the highest cost to implement of all the options
because you're paying the most escalation over time.
And then you have the highest long-term lease costs because you don't
know how long the city's going to have these lease costs.
All right.
So
back to our graph, or diagram.
What we've done is we've taken the
scenario number one, which is you build everything.
That's the orange dot at the bottom.
Assumes you're bidding the project in 2029.
It's $211 million.
Option two, where you delay city campus, is the one, the dot that's furthest on the
upper left, and that's at $268 million.
The option three, which is delay the police station,
is in the middle, is $281 million. And
the last option is the
$337 million. Again, assuming that you're waiting eight years, it should really
go down.
At that point, from 237 onwards,
it's $20 million a year in escalation for
the cost of these projects. So going back to looking at our three blue
dots on the left, you're kind of back to that scenario,
where we talked about it, but we're going to pause it for some
duration of time.
I'll leave it here just for a
minute if there's any questions.
I was thinking you were leaving here for dramatic
effect.
That's it.
All right. So in summary, we've given you four
differentAvenues or implementation strategies for
this. We've talked about the pros and cons relative to that.
The only other thing that I might add here is that
when I first had the opportunity to talk to you, the thing that we
were most potentially excited about these projects is the potential
catalyst that they could bring, particularly with what OB
was doing at the other end of Madison.
And as an architect who works on civic buildings,
I'm incredibly excited about the potential of either of these, or both of
these projects moving at once with the potential economic
catalyst that these projects moving with that credit growth.
It's not often that we often get to work on one project,
police station, city hall, or something along those lines.
The potential to do two projects that have synergy and relationship
together,
as Mark said, this is sort of once in a generational
opportunity.
Hopefully this has given you enough information to think about.
And I think this is where I hand it over to
Mary.
We've been asking questions all along, which is great.
Is there any before we move to the next piece?
We will be able to see these slides for
the-
Yes.
I don't have to watch the video.
No, we can email them out, but they'll be in the minutes.
Paul,
it makes sense. Paul, thank you.
Sure.
I shouldn't have said all of it. There was one piece at the end that I didn't
quite follow, the abandoned downtown.
I feel like
it appeared that the number
assumed that the cost of
building facilities somewhere else-
Yeah
... would be the same as the downtown project,
but it would be a fundamentally different project.
You're right. If we were not doing these projects and we're doing
something else somewhere else, those are not the funds.
And I'm not sure who's sitting behind me, but I think that's a terrible idea.
I should be clear about that. I'm not suggesting
that we should go down that road, but I just want to make sure we're understanding
the picture.
Sure. Our purview, and I just want to reiterate it,
is with the projects in front of us, what does it cost to
implement just them?
Yeah.
As the architects, we don't own these costs of what you do-
Yeah
... outside of that picture.
Well, and also a potential clarification, if I'm understanding your
question or concern correctly,
it's called abandoned downtown because we're leaving for a significant period of
time.
Oh, I see.
The goal would still be to eventually come back-
Got it. Okay
... and build it in this way.
Well, then in theory, there's a fifth option, which is-
We own it
... we're not going to have city facilities.
Right.
Paul, could we condemn the county building and move out there?
Yeah. I think obviously the thing that makes this at least a little bit more
attractive than that is you'd be buying land if you-
Yeah
... went forward. So there's additional costs to us.
If I can play just devil's advocate for a moment here.
If we're building two things at once instead of one,
is there
plenty of contractor
capacity for doing this? I
look at people building subdivisions,
Ponderosa Ridge. They were sort of
phasing that, I think, as much as anything to manage
staff, employee costs, and so on.
I'm just curious,
we're not going to run into a case that we've got a limited pool of
builders who can take on both of these at once.
Yeah.
That we're going to risk inflating a cost because of
a small bidder pool.
Right. I can't tell you what it'll be like in 2029-
Sure
... when these projects will bid. If you were to ask me today, I'd
point you to the number of phone calls I get from contractors right now asking
me what I'm working on.
Mm-hmm.
There's a lot of
capacity, if I could buy a term, or panic, in the
contracting marketplace looking for sizable projects.
There's not a lot going on in the state right now.
We've finished some really big work, obviously the Portland Airport being one of
those projects.
But the
larger construction firms that would work on a project like this, or
even one of them,
they're all looking for work.
Mm-hmm.
The other things you can start to look at are the trajectory of school
bonds. Usually those things go in waves.
There's not a lot of housing being built right now, either
market rate or affordable. Affordable is really mostly what's being built, but not
large enough amounts.
Mm-hmm.
There's not a lot of commercial offices being built because of the lags from the
pandemic.
Mm-hmm.
So lots of the other traditional markets for construction are a little
bit slow.
Mm-hmm. Okay.
I think the thing I'll add, because in prepping for this, we did talk to a lot
of contractors. Contractors we talked to were so intrigued with the idea of
doing these together and all the efficiencies, as Ian had that slide
previously. But it's how they could stagger trades and work with the different
trades on the project. So there's a lot of advantages of
having someone be putting windows on one side and then immediately roll to the
other building and not have to leave for another job site.
So you have a lot of control over who's working and how they work together when you
do them together.
We have a virtual question?
Yeah. Councilor Bowden Allison has the line open right now.
Oh, good. Allison?
Hello, can you hear me okay?
Loud and clear.
Thank you.
So my comment is more general, but I still wanted
it to state it publicly.
I am concerned about the land use
conflict with the Downtown Vitality
Strategy Task Force, their recommendations, and
the current
layout strategies that are being listed.
And I know, again, recognizing that this topic is, more
directed at the funding mechanisms or
pairing buildings for
order of construction. But I really do
want to keep going back towards that a
institutional like control or civic inclusivity versus
institutional control and secure
access needs are really not compatible
with the type of welcoming, open,
shared, public, all of the buzzwords that we're looking for
with a revitalized civic campus. I just
can't see a world where
downtown can have the same
walkability, community gathering, social interaction, economic activity
when there all of these civic structures and there's a law
enforcement center directly across from it.
I think it makes it a really hard
sell to community members. And in addition to all
of the other barriers that were carefully mentioned in what it
takes to get the community on board with a large capital
project that will likely require bond and voter approval.
So I want to bring that back to our conversation
of
thinking about how this land use is or is not compatible with the
recommendations from the task force, and how that
will look to voters who may or may not have to appro-- or
will have to approve if a bond is chosen as a funding
mechanism.
Yeah. Alison,
so you are concerned that having the police station
across from a place where we're trying to engage
a wide variety of people coming in and out
is going to create an essential barrier just by,
no offense to our police, we have great police, just by the essence of
a law enforcement building is going to make some people uncomfortable to
go into the other space or come through that space.
We're a block away.
I will-
Right now
... I will speak for myself,
and just note that others have conveyed to me
directly, but I'm not going to speak for every single person.
But
I definitely would have a deep discomfort
in using a plaza
for, or even the open amphitheater that was in one of the previous
designs, I don't even know if it's on the table anymore.
But having performances and community gatherings and
even a farmers market with a law enforcement center where people are
having the worst days of their lives, to me, doesn't
really
meet the walkability, economic activity, community
gathering, land use plans that the civic
campus improvements and Madison Avenue Corridor
ideas we're trying to promote. So I'm not
trying to detract this conversation too much from it, which is why I've been
waiting to say something, but I want to keep bringing
that forward.
Well, I appreciate your-
You see things from a different kind of lens.
I see you see things from
where we want our police to be. I've
gone through a couple of chiefs now, and everyone says we want community
policing.
Right.
We want to be part of the community.
We want to be interacting with the community, not with the current law
enforcement building that's this big stone-
Big old bunker
... imposing structure or bunker.
And I see this as an opportunity to move towards that
idea of being part of the community, not being something of intimidation or
misery.
Public facing.
Yeah.
I think it was in social infrastructure book where they set up basketball
courts at the back of the police-
Mm-hmm
... station, so there were trying to a more
interaction. Have it be more like a normal other
human beings.
Yeah.
So I agree with you.
Normal people at jobs.
Yeah. I mean,
so yeah, I agree with you. I think that that's also,
correct me if I'm wrong, but more the trend is towards that
community interactive.
So it's more relational rather than this barrier between you and the public, is
that...?
That's kind of also what I feel like we're trying to go towards as a government,
as just the City of Corvallis is I walk in
and people are shocked the mayor's there. They were shocked when I was a counselor.
It's like, we're normal people. We're part of the community, and we should operate
as part of the community. And I think-
Mm-hmm
... police-
Is an extension
... the city government,
our municipal court be part of that.
It's all part of the community and we all function together.
It's necessary.
Mm-hmm.
It's problem-oriented policing is, and community policing
is, has
far, way ahead. We're way, I think
our community is way ahead in that respect.
And we've got the ideas about
police or a fear of police, that's
not anything we've ensured, of course, but
to have a bunker like that, where's the front door on the-
Right
... police station right now? Who knows?
So that's-
Let's try to bring us back on the topic today.
And that's a good conversation, guys.
Sorry.
No.
I'm looking at the clock, and I want to make sure that we have adequate time to
discuss this.
Yeah.
I do want to say, though,
what we have now is a bunker, and trying to find the front door, I
struggled to find it.
But we
are pretty privileged people.
And I understand what Council Bowden is raising is
not everybody feels as comfortable as we do.
And again, I do acknowledge that our police
do really good work. But the perception out there,
and the perception is getting worse and worse and
worse. I do think that that is going to come
up in that design. Yeah, I think it's a valid point.
And it's an absolute legitimate point, which we need to consider,
especially considering it's getting worse and worse and worse.
So now I feel bad that I cut you off. And we didn't move forward.
So if there's anything else that you wanted to point, you wanted to make there,
now's the time. Thank you for offering. No. Okay. All right.
Then with that,
you guys have a lot of information.
And
how do you get to a decision about which
implementation strategy you want to move forward on?
The city council has adopted the International Association of Public
Participation's planning guide to inform their engagement activities.
Got the poster there on the wall right there.
And within that guide is a sustainable decision framework to help
organize information and inputs.
I'm going to quote from the guide now, so I'm going to read from my page.
"The framework is especially helpful as a decision picks up
a political charge. As this occurs, interest usually
pulls into one of the four quadrants, yet decision-makers are
accountable for balanced and lasting decisions that consider the whole
community in relation to budget, resources, environment, and
equity.
In this case, the framework provides decision-makers with the means to
balance the input they receive to make the best long-term decision for
the community."
So the information that you've heard today, and frankly, over the life of the
facility investment work, are the data points to consider through
these framework lenses.
We pulled from the facility investment guiding principles that Ian mentioned at the
beginning and other policy direction, and we've compiled
a set of key areas for you to consider within
each framework component as you work towards a decision.
And then remember that for this exercise of the IAP2
analysis, you are comparing the options for
implementation strategies against each other.
So we've seen the four strategies, now
they compare against each other.
So let's take an example. Under technical is one of the arms.
We have construction efficiencies, which you heard a lot about today.
So how do four implementation strategies
compare on the ability to construct efficiently what the
council's direction is for the civic campus and police facility at this
point in time?
So you want to consider the construction management, the staging of materials,
staff collaboration opportunities, that parking garage design,
and renovation of leased space to meet our service delivery
needs, and as we mentioned, especially important for police operations.
The facility investment guiding principles call for functional spaces
that are accessible, inclusive, and accommodate growth.
So how do the four options in your mind compare on achieving
these objectives?
Moving to environment.
A topic we've discussed in the past, and it came up again- This one ...
is the subpar resiliency of City Hall and the LED, law
enforcement.
The new buildings under consideration will have more robust
resiliency than the current structures do.
So which implementation strategy or strategies meet the resiliency
concern that's been brought forward?
The Climate Action Plan, which is one of our guiding documents,
in terms of policy direction,
it calls for actions that will achieve other co-benefits in
addition to greenhouse gas reductions, some of which are seen on
the list here.
And then speaking of the big reveal on energy
efficiency- Sorry ... I'm going to kick it over to Mark because I'm pouting that
you took my glory away. Are you ready for me to go to the next
slide? Just a moment. Yeah. We've talked a lot about City
Hall, the space heaters, and leaky windows
and all that sort of thing. And I really want to credit Scott
Dipod, our sustainability coordinator, and Abby Alexander, our innovation
manager. We actually have been able to dig some data, go through
the data, and look at what is our energy usage at the
City Hall building and compare that
to some other facilities. So go ahead, Mary.
So here is a comparison of energy
usage between the Kalapuya building on the left, that is the Benton
County's
newly remodeled
facility out in Southwest Corvallis.
You have the law enforcement building and City Hall, and you can
see how much more energy City
Hall uses. That's on an annual basis, and you can see
the energy we're using at these different facilities.
Purchased electricity, solar, and in the
magenta is natural gas.
So significantly more energy we're using on an annual basis at City
Hall.
What's the square footage of each of those? Geographic segment.
When you talk about square footage, it becomes even more dramatic.
So per square foot, the Kalapuya building- Per square foot ...
33.7.
City Hall is 10X per square foot
because the Kalapuya building is 2.7 times
larger than City Hall. Right.
So essentially, the power we use for just the City Hall
building would power the county's Kalapuya
building for 10 years.So that's
something you can see a pretty dramatic impact we're having
on an ongoing basis.
It's those tall ceilings, drafty windows.
Right. Yeah.
If I can just make a quick comment.
Sure.
This statistic is a standard energy use
index, and it's a standard metric for building efficiency.
And one can look up
typical types of buildings, and they'll tell you here's about the range of what
it should be. When people talk about a net zero energy building,
that EUI index is zero.
Mm-hmm.
As architects, we've done a couple of net zero buildings,
others in our sphere of work too.
Okay. I'm going to go back to the IAP2 sustainable decision
framework. Now we're talking about the economic piece.
Obviously, a major component of the economic lens is the positive
construction, but it's not the only data point.
Another consideration is overall financial stewardship.
As we've heard today, any of the strategies will require staff to
relocate to a leased facility.
This means annual lease payments
added to the cost to renovate the space to meet the service delivery needs, either
from civic campus staff, police staff, or both.
So this is an investment of city resources without a resulting tangible
asset. There's no building at the end that the city owns, but we're putting
potentially millions of dollars into that, a year into that
leased facility.
So you want to consider how does each strategy support or doesn't
support financial stewardship, along with recruiting and
retention, which Mark mentioned at the beginning.
And then final arm under this discussion is community benefit.
Again, as I mentioned, these topics, especially ones on this page,
are objectives of the facility investment guiding principles and
other city policy documents.
They also happen to align with the goals that are coming out of the Downtown
Vitality Strategy Task Force work.
So as you think about the different strategies for
implementation,
how do they further these objectives in support of what the community
has
over the years and continues to say that it values?
Okay, so we have the four
arms. We have topics that we would want to consider.
We look at the near-term results of the various implementation
strategies through these framework lenses,
and these are the results that we came up with.
So in comparing strategies against each other,
strategy one has the best outcomes for achieving the
objectives in each of the components of the
framework, and those objectives, again, coming from policy documents and the
guiding principles.
In the middle two, within the strategies to build one facility now and the other
later, strategy two, building the police department first,
ranks better than strategy three on environmental,
primarily because of those resiliency gains you get from a robust
911 and just the police department building in general, so
police can continue to operate, provide public services in an
emergency.
It, however, ranks lower on economic.
One is because that building just costs more than Civic Campus.
So even in the near term, that building costs more.
But also, you have that long-term lease required for the Civic Campus
options that aren't included in the dollar amounts, but we know is an
ongoing cost to the city on an annual basis.
Strategy three, the third one from the left, to build the Civic Campus
first, ranks slightly better on the community benefit than strategy
two because of these public gathering spaces that are incorporated in the building
design and the plus.
And strategy four,
which is the abandoned downtown near term,
does have some benefit on a technical
perspective. Theoretically, all of your staff is located in the same
leased facility, so those staff collaboration advantages
are achieved in this
option. And then for environmental, well, I think Mark's
graphics spoke for themselves. We're no longer occupying and
fueling two buildings that have such poor-- Again, with the
assumption and the hope that the leased facility that we find would
be a tighter envelope and a better performer on those
greenhouse gas kind of goals.
And then so that concludes the second part of
our conversation. So let me just go back to this slide and ask if there's any
questions on the IAP2 analysis.
Could you repeat what the community benefit, the
fourth item on community benefit?
First was welcoming and very inclusive.
Second was community vision and
organization. Third, equal spaces for community.
What was the fourth? Downtown-
Downtown vitality and a resilient Iowa.
Thanks.
And again, you will have this information.
Yeah, I
need to put it down.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Okay.
Oh, good.
So a lot of information.
Big dollars, so maybe you're happy you're not making a decision today.
So then the next steps for us is to come back
at your work session on May 7th, where
we will have done some work investigating the revenue
sources that you asked us to investigate regarding facilities and
operating costs. So we'll be back at a work session there,
and then in June and maybe bleeding over into
early July, we'll start moving towards a
decision on the revenue side and facility side.
That's what we envision moving forward.
And these are-- They're difficult
challenges to address. And I think that's why,
again, I bring my props. We've come here many times
before,
and people have just stepped away because they're challenging
things.
But I believe it's our responsibility to act
responsible,
to
be good stewards of the organization that serves our community, and good
stewards of
the resources from our community.
So with that, other general questions, or I'll turn it over to the
manager.
Any other questions?
No.
Well,
I was going to say, for me, just based on what I see, it's like to me, the
decision's clear.
Mm-hmm.
But that's just me from a very data kind of
mindset. So I look forward to our next conversation,
and I appreciate the presentation and
the information.
John?
Yeah, I think
what's particularly striking
is the-- Well, for me, the decision, the direction seems pretty clear as
well for a number of
reasons. One is,
in terms of total cost,
it's going to be the cheapest solution, the best, the most cost-effective
solution.
I think it does dovetail nicely with what's coming out of the Downtown
Vitality Strategy Task Force.
I think it particularly demonstrates our commitment to downtown.
And I think that
to dive a little further into the cost side of things,
I think what's particularly striking, again, I'll make the comment again.
I think
we're used to living from this month to the next month or this year to the
next year. I think for a lot of folks thinking that, well, we'll just
delay it, seems like, well, it's a no-brainer.
That seems like a reasonable thing to do.
Yet the fact that construction costs going up on average
6% per year, it doesn't take very many years before
that becomes a
hurdle to overcome that we could have overcome many, many decades ago.
So I think that strikes me as well
as
a real takeaway from this.
I do think that I will,
I think in the interest of completeness, I do want to
highlight something that Jim said,
which is, there is that not very
desirable fifth option out there, which is to literally abandon
downtown,
and I don't think anybody's wanting that to happen.
But if the answer is
let's
find absolute cheapest
solution, we can relocate
completely out of downtown.
I've said this before. I'm
not as supportive of it, so I'll say it, but I'm not supportive of it.
We can certainly buy a building off the HP campus, and then we can
retrofit it, and good luck to the response time to Southtown for the
police
response
there. And downtown vitality will take an enormous hit.
This is I don't think this is what we want for our downtown.
So there are cheaper, quote unquote, "cheaper solutions"-
Cheaper
... in that we don't have to address this issue in the short term,
but more expensive in the long term because the impact will be felt for
generations.
Mm-hmm.
So
it's important for people to understand that
not only do we have
the opportunity
to put a stake in the ground for the future that will last
generations,
we also run the risk
of creating a situation that is likely
irrecoverable from for generations.
Mm-hmm.
So those are my observations. And as to
the topic
that
was discussed about police and safety downtown, I know one of the things coming out
of the Downtown Vitality Strategy Task Force is people want to save downtown.
Mm-hmm.
I think that
I certainly understand there are folks who
have challenges in their interactions with the police department.
If I were the police chief,
I would be highly
focused on effectiveness with the community,
and if things were getting dramatically and drastically
worse, I'd
certainly be all over that, and I certainly invite city manager and the
police
to address any concerns that they have in that
realm. But I don't...
Charlie made the comment that things are getting worse and worse, and I haven't
seen any evidence to that.
Not here.
The North Police Department is doing excellent.
I want to make it really clear that I'm not talking about them, but the
public perception-
Nationally
... nationally is not good.
Maybe we can change that.
Yeah. I think you have an opportunity to change that here.
Yeah. We think we have
a great situation here, so I wouldn't want to
take the multiple discussions and years of discussion we've had about
this, and make a decision about the location of a
police department,
based on perception of what's happening in Asheville.
Mm-hmm.
And so
I'm very supportive of moving forward with an option.
If I could just push back a little bit on your first part of that comment, not on
how police are doing.
Mm-hmm.
In terms of that it would be cheaper to go someplace
else, and your example being HP, it's important to
recognize, I think, in that conversations...
Like when someone hears it's cheaper, it's like, "Oh, well then it's cheaper." But
how much cheaper? Or is it cheaper?
Would be a question we would have to explore more.
Right.
The buildings in HP were constructed at a period of
time that,
at least in preliminary investigations or conversations,
don't seem to meet the seismic resiliency that we would need for a 911
facility.
Mm-hmm.
And so even if we bought the building, are we basically
tearing it down and constructing, at least for police, a new facility?
So that cheaper may be just a little bit nervous to have out there in
the world.
Okay. Yeah.
Because we know that-
Thank you for that clarification.
When I came up to Corvallis in 1995,
I worked in the, eventually, the newest building on the HP campus,
so that's 1995.
So I am aware of age of the buildings.
Yeah.
Second,
I do think,
your point of we would have to quantify the cost is
absolutely... I second that 1,000%, and I'm sorry if I misspoke
about that.
Mm-hmm.
I think what I meant to say, in terms of cheapest,
is that
we could make
that decision that would force that to be the solution in the short
term, and it might, in the first year,
save money or cost less than thinking something large.
But it will have both economic and
non-economic costs in the long run that I would posit actually
outweigh the cost of what we're looking at.
Mm-hmm.
So thank you for the clarification.
Yeah.
And that's a great example, if I may, is-
Yeah
... the court building.
25 years ago, we chose to lease that building, not buy it.
We end up paying,
in today's dollars, $1.9 million in lease costs,
and then we went out and bought the building for another 1.4 million.
And that doesn't include all the money we had to pour into it,
as far as maintenance and everything else.
So it seems, oh, it's just cheap, let's just lease it.
But in the end,
that all adds up.
Yeah. And I would like to add about just the focus on downtown and the impact
our decisions have on downtown.
When I was the former city councilor for downtown, and any time a
business closes doors and you get a vacant storefront, people said, "Look,
downtown's dying."
Mm-hmm.
And the same thing was said when the county vacated their building and left
downtown.
Mm-hmm.
They felt everybody was like, "Look, downtown's going to die."
Mm-hmm.
What are we going to do?
We have task forces that shows that there's a lot of interest in
downtown, and
if we make a decision that removes city facilities from
downtown,
I think it's the nail in the coffin.
Sure.
That's the understatement. Because at least from the community's
perspective, is they're going to think we're abandoning what we say we care about,
and that's not the direction I would be happy to go at all.
So remember that I do not support-
I know.
I do want to address that there
can be a perception that it's, let's just do a cheaper solution.
And I think it can be cheaper in the moment,
and much more costly in the long run.
Yeah.
Yeah. In so many ways.
Yeah.
In so many ways.
That was my point.
Not just with money.
Well, part of what we're talking about is the cost of failure to act.
Mm-hmm.
There's also the cost if you just fail.
Because is it going to be a case we're going to be making
however we end up
articulating that, but we're going to have a story to tell, and part of
the story is what are the costs of our
failure-
Yes
... to maintain a presence downtown, to make use of
the opportunity that we have related to the
civic campus and downtown. There's some
aspects of that that we're only beginning to articulate.
Mm-hmm.
Which is
dealing with is that we have
a downtown vitality plan
that's
getting close, but it's not there yet.
And
so that whole aspect of a civic campus and
its relationship to a vital community
is something that would, in some ways, happen as part of a design
process, right? In order to undertake the design process, we
have
money to spend and decisions to make.
And so there's a wish we could put the
points a little bit because that's
part of the story we're trying to tell.
Is what can our downtown be, especially with
the civic campus, and a civic
campus that's reimagined
as a place for our community to gather
and for a place for our community to rub shoulders with the police department.
If you want to take a moment to try to reflect on the lack of it- ...
following through with these plans.
Yeah.
How much has that contributed to the current state of downtown?
Correct.
Yeah.
And it's hard to
communicate that vision
until it's there. But I've said this before, you think about
Riverfront Park, a lot of controversy over that.
Totally.
But who here could imagine downtown Corvallis without it?
Yeah.
Right.
And so it's-
I think this would be exactly the same.
To be fair, there was a lot of compromise that went into the final
design on downtown, because that was my first thing that I was
paying attention to-
Mm-hmm
... when I moved, so what was happening in Corvallis. I was a new resident.
And the original design is now what we ended up with.
So there was a lot-
You actually put it to a referendum, which I think-
A lot of community engagement in that
... failed.
I just wanted to interject that there are members of the downtown
task force
that are just making the connection
between the importance of having facilities downtown to the
vitality of downtown. So we have a job to
do to properly
communicate to the community the crucial
aspect of having
staff, police, community
focal point,
and then do this thing.
As I think you said, how would it look to the community
if
we fail at this?
How about we just give up and say, "Oh well, we can't afford it.
We're going to move up to H Street." In the middle of trying to
revitalize downtown?
So anyway.
We're failing by not making the difficult decision.
Right. So anyway, we have our work cut out for us from a messaging
standpoint, because we've been at the downtown task force and the
civic campus for how long, and people do not make the connection.
Clint.
I was
really involved in the downtown riverfront stuff
in more than one way,
and there were opponents, and there were proponents, but what they had in
common was that something was going to happen at the river.
Mm-hmm.
And so the
issue was around the details of what was going to happen, wasn't that
something wasn't going to happen.
And so
at core, there was consensus about
the riverfront. It was time to transform it into a parking lot,
because that's what it was, it was a gravel parking lot,
to something else. And
so part of our responsibility in all of this
is going to be to articulate the vision
that
this is the future we want, even if we don't know the
details yet, and even if there's going to be a lot of work to do
to articulate in specifics what is this
going to look like, how is it going to benefit the community and downtown.
And so if we're going to do this, it's our job to build that
consensus.
Mm-hmm. Right.
In the same way that people started planning
a future riverfront that was going to be not gravel parking lots
anyway.
Yeah. I think we need to decide what we want for camp.
But I'll give you an example.
Our City Hall right now, some people love it, some people hate it,
just by the looks of it.
But if you look at CHS, the old high school that's
torn down, I like the old school, but the new school,
so much better.
Mm-hmm.
Way better in terms of
classroom and
environment,
and-
I index this class I
disagree.
And you think about what can we do if we got rid of that
barracks, or whatever you want to call it, that the law enforcement
building is now. Guess what you could put there?
You could put-
Over/under
... you could put all kinds
of beneficial things for our folks.
We keep the courthouse, we keep the other historic aspects of
downtown.
So,
at first I thought, there's a lot of pushback
about
the city hall, we should preserve it.
But, the earthquake that's coming around, I don't know, the PBS
special, the
latest special on
the
big one.
30, 35% chance in the next 50 years.
So if we don't do something now, we're going to end up-
We might be forced to.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah. We will not have
the facilities to continue with
operating the city.
So we're not going to wait for the earthquake to have
this happen, but if you think
it's
been
300 years since it last happened, and the average is
250 years, and yeah. Take a look at that and
be scared.
We definitely have some decisions to make and some more information to
come. So-
Yes
...
maybe we should move on here so we can get out of here at a reasonable time.
But again, I really appreciate the effort, the work, and I love the data.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
It can be shocking.
Yeah. It's similar to the person that said, also, "I'd really like that."
I'd like to see the money part of it.
Good. I know.
So we'll move on now.
Community comments, we did receive some written community comments in your email,
so be sure to read that.
Any questions on the three-month calendar?
Charles,
I submitted something-
Yeah
... and Council of Impact also submitted something to get on the
agenda. When are we actually going to have those conversations?
I'll be looking to schedule those things at the end of January.
With those, I was specifically waiting for the last conversation we had
on Monday around how the process should be.
So those are coming.
Okay. I didn't feel like we came to any sort of understanding of how the process
would be.
No. I think the only we're going to do at this point-
How I'm comfortable
... is to move forward and do it.
So that will be happening. Anything else?
All right. I'll turn the mic back. I say we're adjourned. Thank you.