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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
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