City Council - Regular Meeting

And we are live. We made it to Tuesday, May 26. Thank you all so much. You have joined Tumwater City Council work session. Meeting is now called to order. We are all present. Thank you so much, council and our guests. Done with roll call on the number three, city hall space planning. Paul, did you want to set up our speakers and tell council what we're looking for?

Right.

Happy to.

Thank you so much. First off, thank you for being here tonight. Just a couple of observations since I've been working here since January and one of the things that I've been doing is try to meet with all the employees in the city one-on-one. So far I've had 39 one-on-one meetings. Of the 39, 29 work out of City Hall and of the 29 employees who work out of City Hall, 21 of them when asked unprompted about anything, if you could change anything in overnight tomorrow, you know, about your work, what would it be? And really, I tell them the scale is of no relevance. So it's as big or as little as you want it to be. 21 out of the 29 said that the space is not working for them or it's hard for them or it creates challenges.

Joan, can you hear us?

Now I can. Thank you.

Thank you, Joan.

So 21 of the 29 employees expressed struggles, whether it be, you know, we have employees that are two to three deep in one office. Sometimes that's a supervisor with a subordinate. It's hard to have confidential conversations. It's hard to be on the phone. It's hard to be on a virtual meeting when you have someone sitting three feet from you. It's really hard to work through conflict in a healthy way if you're having something that you're struggling with and they're two feet from you all day, every day. It's hard to work through that. And so it just creates some dynamics that can be challenging for folks.

Can you not go like this next time? Yes. Thank you.

I'll put my hands a little bit. I'll put them in my pocket.

What are you trying to say, Paul?

And so anyway, so yeah.

That's true. Too much is out in the open.

I forgot it.

I think also, too, some of the feedback we hear, if you get here early, you can get a parking spot. And then what happens is if you come between like 8 and 1130 when people start going to lunch, whether you're a staff person or a community member, it can be hard to find a parking spot. Our cubicles are so crammed. Many of them are not ADA accessible. Our walls were built in a time when there's just not a lot between them, so oftentimes you can hear through walls. We've had confidential exec sessions in conference rooms where you can hear voices outside of it. We also have only three conference rooms in the main part of City Hall. which is not enough, especially when you have so many employees working in cubicles or in a shared office. There's really not a lot of spaces for people to go have a confidential or a private or even a focused discussion. We don't have lactation rooms like most modern facilities these days. We also don't have any wellness facilities. And so there's a lot of challenges. And I think for a long time, staff have been making the best of it. And that's what they've been told to do. We need to make the best of it. We need to make the best of it. And I can tell you, we're reaching a point where that's getting harder and harder every day. I think it affects how we recruit staff, who we recruit. It affects our ability to retain staff. It's just not the type sort of thing you would see in other more modern facilities. It's been a great building. So I want to, while I'm acknowledging some of its shortfalls, it's served Tumwater really, really well. But as Tumwater continues to grow, it's going to be harder and harder to make it work. And I want to say that the 21 staff that brought it up, they weren't complaining. It wasn't like they led with that. That was me asking them like this question. could be different so I don't want to make it sound like people aren't you know grateful for having a space to work out of and for having a job at the city because they most definitely are so recognizing that we also know that we're kind of at a unique time and that there are a few vacant buildings in Tumwater and so we have been looking at that and seeing what is out there what's available and And we know that we are at unique price points because of the multiple vacancies that are available with state buildings. The state employees serve across the state. Their mission, it's much easier for them to work more predominantly remotely for city staff. Our customers are here. People expect a place to come and interface with staff, particularly when they're working through a complex land use issue, when they need to connect with the police department when they wanna meet with the mayor, when they wanna meet with council members. There's so many, City Hall is the entrance point for the community to have interface with the city and being able to do that in person in a comfortable place, in a confidential space, in a place where people feel safe and comfortable is really, really vital. So recognizing that, about a month and a half ago, we gave council, following one of these work sessions, a tour of the city hall facility just because we weren't sure how recent it was that city council members had walked through the building. And most of the feedback that I received from all of you really affirmed, you know, the same observations that I had shared that the staff had been describing. So as all that was happening, we brought artisans group under contract to do really a high-level spatial analysis, recognizing there's some unique opportunities from a real estate perspective, recognizing that we've kicked this can down the road for a long time. What does that mean if we want to continue to do that, which is an option? And what are some things that maybe we haven't thought about? So they've actually looked at a few other options that at the staff we hadn't come up with. So with that, I think I'll kick it over to them because they're... their analysis really goes through everything, but I just kind of wanted to frame that up. What we're looking for from Council tonight, and I see Councilmember Cassie has a question, but what we're looking for is some general direction. We have four options for you, and the question would be, is there one of these options in particular that Council's more interested in having staff pursue, and if so, we can begin to work on whatever that option is, or is there something else that you see that maybe we're not thinking of, or a combination, or that sort of thing. So that's what we're looking for tonight. And I'll stop there.

Joan, you have your hand up? I do. I'm just wondering if it's on my end or yours. I can't see anybody in the chamber or anyone talking. All I can see is people who are also online. Might be on my end. I don't know.

How about now?

Yeah, the answer for... For the city, it's just coming through. It's a black screen.

Thanks, Dan. I can hear okay.

Yep, seeing the same thing you are, Joan.

Are you in the same boat? Yep. Oh, good. I thought it was my technical skills.

I'm wearing a great outfit, Joan. You can't see it, but I love my outfit today. So Lance and Tracy are working on it. Everyone looks great today.

No worries, Dan and I can hear, so that's good.

Can you see the presentation?

No.

That's going to be a problem.

Council Member Gatsby, Lance, our IT guru, has said that you will see the presentation in a moment.

Well, if he said it, it'll happen.

We can see the presentation now.

Oh, great. Okay, so you can see the presentation, but you can't see us. That'll work. Imagine. Imagine. But it's nice to see you again, Joan. We've met before. I'm Tessa Bradley, and I'm one of the principal architects in the Artisans Group. Nice to meet you. And this is Lindsay. Hi, I'm Lindsay Vernian, also with the Artisans Group. And Lindsay's one of our senior architects, and she worked over 10 years in Portland on very large buildings doing space planning for just such a project as this. So we combined forces to do this study for the city of Tumwater. And I wanted to say that these are really rough ideas of construction. This is historical data from other projects, both us and other firms locally. And also, we did not explore every way you could solve this. we tried to explore the four most predominant or likely ways that you could solve this. There might be considerations that we didn't explore, but these are the most likely solutions. So that's what we focused on. So with that, I think we will jump into. And don't feel like you can't stop us and ask questions. There's a lot of dense information here. And obviously, Paul has it when we're done. But we started with a study that some of you might be familiar with from about 11 years ago. It was done that had some great ideas. And of course, 11 years ago, it was projecting 10 and 20 years ahead. And so now we know more than we did when they did that study 11 years ago. And if you want to talk about that, go for it.

Yeah. So this is kind of showing the there was. four options that they presented, and this option D was kind of the favorite option. And it came with an addition on the back of the building, a roughly 10,000 square foot addition, and then an urban park at the back of the property. It is a really good starting point for us to do all of our work. We read through all of this and kind of analyzed what was working about it, what wasn't working about it. what are your new needs and do those kind of roughly align with the projections that we had from this previous study. One of the big things about this that some were the numbers that are slightly untrue today than they were previously and one of those big things is we have a lot of people downstairs in the basement so taking all those one of those big things we know is that people don't like to work in basements they want to be up where there's natural light so One of our first thoughts in kind of analyzing your current situation was how much space do we need to get all of those people up out of the basement? And then also kind of analyzing this study, it basically said that the police station size was perfect as it was, and it didn't anticipate any addition to the police station area. And the police station is in about a third of the space that they actually need right now to be functional. Yeah. So we basically, that's an additional roughly 22,000 square feet of space that was not thought about previously. So that's a big number. And that kind of like adds to kind of the rolling snowball of you guys have blossomed. There's lots of new people here. Some are a group faster than this projection projected.

Yes, which is wonderful, which is great. The other thing that was sort of maybe, you know, it's weird to criticize someone else's work, but hindsight's 20-20, so I'm diving in. But something that the study perhaps didn't really grant enough focus on was the parking. So this parking is very, very, very minimal for a building of its size. And really, if you functionally said, this is the option and we want to pursue this and we were designing it, We would have to immediately obliterate that beautiful urban park on the bottom and that would all have to be parking. And even then you would not meet your parking needs. So parking picks up a lot of space and it's really unsexy and it's really unfun, but it's where almost every development starts is can we park the amount of people we need to put in this building? And so those are kind of the large scale takeaways from some of this early work.

Yeah. what numbers they were looking at for the police department size at that point? Because are we more or less?

They actually didn't say anything about the police department size in this master plan.

But they assumed no square footage for them. They assumed no additional square footage. They assumed what they had was plenty.

Okay. Do we know how much we've grown in the police department since then? Is it roughly the same amount of people? I don't know.

Yeah. Like 30s, 20s, late high 20s, early 30s.

I think that the I think up there I have that they're anticipating an additional 25 for the police force in the next five to 10 years.

Just just for Paul, I'll let you go first. There's a delay on online. So Paul, you go first.

Oh, sure. I was just going to say that in addition to the police officers, there's also the administrative support staff. We have records analysts, a few more, particularly now with the body-worn cameras. We have two code enforcement officers that also help with transport. There's administrative staff that help with payroll and public records requests. And so, anyway, so it's not just the police department. It's also other staffing that serves their needs. Yeah.

Brandon?

So the only thing I was going to say is one thing with the parking is that the original plan, I believe, included adding parking on Israel Road by eliminating the left turn lane. However, it did... land on no bike lanes because at the time it wasn't anticipated that that would be a bike lane corridor. However, we've got significant bike lane corridors on Little Rock Road, Taiyi Drive, and some more anticipated on Capitol Boulevard into Motor Boulevard. So that vision doesn't work anymore.

That's great feedback. Thank you, Brandon.

To move us forward, This master plan, we have to identify an alternative option, right? So it's no use talking about things. This is more like this is what we were looking at, but now we find something that accommodates or will serve our needs.

Exactly. And I'm going to try to respond a little bit in that. Before we look at other options, we wanted to spend some time just acknowledging the work that had been previously done and just recognize that if we don't pursue other options, this is one option that remains for us, but there are issues with it. And so that was some of the work.

And well said, Peter. This probably isn't like the best use of our time in that sense, but it is great to understand the context of all your options. And our job is to try and be unbiased and present to you data to make good decisions for the city. And so that will become relevant with some comparisons later. So we've covered most of this. One other little piece of information I will add to this slide. Oh, I have a pointer. Just a little thing. But in addition to increasing stress on the amount of people in this building, Tumwater also has substantial leases of other spaces, right? So one of the ways that Tumwater responded to not having enough room for everybody is they started renting other spaces and moving people out of this building. And they've been doing that for some time. So we did not take into account these leases in our comparison, but they will likely feed some options to be more relevant than others.

So part of, let's go through this. This option is the We're going to stay with what we've got right now because that is going to work for us right now. And then eventually at a later date, do an addition to the back of the building. That addition to the back of the building will probably be actually like double the size of this building. So it's not just like a small little thing on the back of the building. It's going to, it will dwarf.

It's like a mullet. This building would be in the front and then all the hair would be in the back. So we're going to get a big building.

We're going to lose a lot of the trees to new parking. Right now you have 74 parking stalls on site, and the previous master plan said that they needed roughly 175. So you're more than doubling the amount of parking that's currently on site, as well as building a building behind. And then one of the things that... In addition, we kind of have touched on a little bit of the current, like the security standards of our existing building and how advanced security has become public security and public and private areas. So that's one thing that would also need to be addressed in a retrofit and renovation to this existing building.

Yeah, the security, you know, the security needs for a city hall has evolved substantially since this building was designed and built. And so we do see that reflected in the relative safety of the staff. So then we have option B. This is just a fictitious rendering that we got out of AI, which was really fun for us, in case you're wondering.

So can you go back to course of action one? Sure. Course of action one is stay in existing building, continue to temporarily lease. So do what we're doing. Right now.

Yeah. And then eventually plan a really large addition off the back and sort of acknowledging that you will still have problems in that you will quickly grow too big for that large addition, what you can accommodate on the site, as well as the parking will not really be solved in kind of multiple nuanced ways.

And we can share these slides with council afterwards, right? Yeah. Okay. So, Angela, we'll share these with everybody. Okay.

One thing that I noticed reading this slide was that it's logistically challenging to have an occupied building and be having a construction site behind it?

So I put that in there because many of you know the building that I self-developed for our firm and we operated our business out of the little house attached to the big building. And I think I lost maybe 20 to 25% of my staff in that year, which we have never had turnover like that because it is so ungodly difficult to work next to a construction site. It is like a descent into madness. And there's no way to avoid that. And I think it would greatly affect the mental health and retention of your staff to build on this building and be remodeling this building while people are trying to work here.

Any other comments, questions regarding option A before we do B, C, and D?

All right. Option B is we find a fictitious lot and we put a fictitious new city hall on it. So in this scenario, we just wanted to give you conceptual ideas to consider against your other options. So this would be essentially like what the city of Olympia did, right? They found another lot, they built a new city hall. In this proposal to keep it sort of apples to apples, we propose still leaving the police station here in this building and only relocating the city hall. You know, obviously the advantages of that would be you'd have a new city hall that you could design exactly how you wanted and it could be modern and it could be safe and all the wonderful things that come with that. Most of the drawbacks are going to be about time. And many of those drawbacks about time will be about money, which we have a good slide about later that's very helpful. But I also think it's an interesting time to try and build a new City Hall when people are really feeling the pressure of the cost of living. And then also, we did not know this, but we were told it would require a ballot measure to fund, which might be a very difficult ask in these times. So not saying it couldn't be done, but saying that it might have more headwinds than other options available to you. And we will explore some of the costs around that in our comparison slide. Anything else, Lindsay? Anything? Questions on that? Oh, yeah. Questions on option B? You want to walk us through this one?

Option C is a new police station. And we put a rendering up of the new Lacey police station because they did just that.

How old are you?

I knew you would love that. I knew you would love that, Lieta. So this is basically building, leaving City Hall where it is currently and taking the police station and moving it somewhere else. There are similar issues to the same as kind of building a new city hall building is you have to find the property and find, you know, you would like a new police station to be somewhat central to Tom Water. You don't want to build it out on the outskirts. So finding a centralized property that can withstand a building of this size might be kind of difficult. The other thing that comes with a police station that is different than a city hall building is that a police station has to be an essential facility, which means that it has to not only stand up in an earthquake, but it has to still be completely operational after an earthquake, which most buildings are not built to maintain efficiency and operations. after an earthquake. They're just meant to stand and make sure that people can evacuate after an earthquake and they don't necessarily need to be operational after an earthquake. So that comes with a 20-ish percent cost upgrade because everything has to be secured. Everything has to be done in a more structured way. And that just comes with extra dollar signs. would be an incredible safe new essential facility that would be a wonderful add to the city of Tumwater and it would help kind of with the breathing room of being able for the city hall employees to kind of take over that space and kind of expand.

The shortcoming of the strategy would be that you would still have to do an addition on this building and you would still have to retrofit this building to modern standards.

You're doing three construction projects with this project.

So, you know, and it's interesting. You sort of have to think of the police station as being grandfathered in. If they stay in this building and they take over this building, they can over time retrofit this building and bring it up to meet their standards. Them simply having more space would help them immensely right now. But if we move them, then you have to meet all the modern day standards, which is that essential building that Lindsay's talking about. And I've... I don't want to speak out of turn or say anything inaccurate. I believe that Lacey did suffer a lot of cost overruns on this building. I believe it was more expensive than anyone anticipated, and that was a really big burden on them, which is sort of the nature of development in some ways, and then also the nature of building, you know, one of these essential facilities. Questions on that? Yeah, any questions on option C? Okay, so now we get to option D. which is what originally started the study, right? Which is, everyone's been in the building, right? Down the way. Why don't you jump in here, Lindsay? You've been doing most of this work.

Yeah. Let's remember Kathy has not. Oh, okay.

So this building, Kathy, is just down Israel Road and it is an existing vacant 95,000 square foot building over three floors. and it was previously a Department of Health building, I believe, for the state, and they occupied the entire thing, so it's built as a one-tenant building. It was built in 2004, and the assessment on it is in pretty good shape. It will need new mechanical systems over the like as a new tenant moves in, because they're roughly at their 20 year life cycle. The age of that 2004 build allows for kind of a roughly 40 year life cycle for this building. So you still, if you were to move into this building, you could assume to be here for at least 40 years. The Wonderful thing about moving into an existing building is that you can save a lot of time and money and design fee costs and construction costs. It's already there.

And it's already depreciated. So you're not paying the upfront ticket price of anything new.

One of the other really wonderful things about this building is that it's currently empty. And empty buildings don't really... activate a community very much. So if you were to be able to add a bunch of people into this building and start to activate the building, things just start happening and the community starts activating more. And it's the most sustainable thing you can do to is to utilize existing building stocks. Construction is always, it's a big, it's a big lift. And This like keeping existing stuff from either getting demolished and being able to reuse it is like the most highly sustainable thing you can possibly do. So there's always that to think about. If you can modify it slightly to meet your needs, that's the absolute best solution for you, as well as kind of the cheapest solution.

So we've got some space planning we've done as a study that we'll share in some future slides, but Essentially, Tumwater, with a 10-year outlook, could take over about two-thirds of this building pretty easily. And over 40 years, they would take over 100% of the building, is our estimation, if not sooner than that. So Olympia, I know, has outgrown their city hall, and that's a challenge for them. And they're starting to do what Tumwater did, where they're leasing other spaces and moving people out. But I think... having had a decentralized office before, I think culturally that can be problematic. You get really siloed departments and it gets complicated to have a culture for a company, a city of that size when you do start to decentralize offices like that. So it's challenging, right? There's no perfect solution. What we're trying to do is find an adequate or a good solution. So this This building is very intriguing in that it sort of future-proofs a lot of Tumwater's growth in a way that a smaller building wouldn't. What else did I miss? I think that's it. And time. You could be in this building in under two years by my estimation, which you will see on the summary page that no other option is going to give you that kind of time. And time. right now is the biggest impact on money as a development. This is great. Lindsay pulled this together. We were just talking about sort of the campus nature of Tumwater and how if you did, you know, take this building, it's really ideally located, you know, sort of like a strip. You guys have sort of a campus growing along Israel Road there. OK, this is like the least sexy slide in the history of slides, but it's really helpful. So what we've done is we've created pros and cons of these options, option A, option B, option C, and option D. And you can see that the first line is cost per square foot. We are not even talking about off-site improvements. So we kept this simple. So we kept it vertical construction. That means the buildings. That doesn't mean sewers or running new power lines or any of that. And that accounts for a lot of cost on the development. But for the sake of not knowing what those would be, because we don't have a real lot to consider or anything to study, we just removed them. So it does create these numbers down at the bottom would be bigger. if you take into account off-site improvements, which that building down the street will have relatively none, if any. Maybe car chargers, something like that. So we have our option A, around $650 a square foot. New city hall, similar. New police station, probably around $800 a square foot. And then we have the remodel costs, which we estimated about $300 per square foot, which is a pretty nice TI tenant improvement for that building.

Angela, you had your hand up and then you put your fingers in.

Yes. So if we build, if we decide to go with build a new city hall and a new police station, then that's the cost that we're looking at.

So if you did option B and option C, So like the police don't stay here in this existing building. That's what we're looking at for option C. So option C is a new police station and a remodeled city hall. Okay. Yeah. So it'd be $25 million in acquisition costs, $8.5 million in the city retrofit, $8.5 million because you still need an addition on this existing city hall. So that brings you to about $42.8 million in today's dollars. Okay. So that was a confusion. Yeah. Sorry. We kind of tried to list it out here because... You know, there's so many variables and so many options, and we're trying to really do an unbiased comparison of your options. So we tried to really account, at least apply some money to everything we knew about. So we kind of discussed the advantages and disadvantages. And then this opinion of probable cost, we kind of add up our options down here for each option. But what's really interesting is the element of time. So I met with a financial advisor today, and he used a lot of words I didn't understand. And then he said that inflation was only 4% last year. That is not what the internet tells me, not what my grocery bill tells me. So the internet says that inflation for the past few years has been more like between 9% and 15%. So we used 9%. because that's what it's been the last few years in relative increase. Because we're not just dealing with the inflation of the dollar, we're dealing with the inflation of construction. And construction is going faster than the inflation of the dollar by a lot. And so I have projects that are- What's that?

I was just gonna say that you are 100% correct on construction costs. They're greatly exceeding inflation. Like we're seeing it. We can't even- We can't accurately estimate construction costs at this point because it's so insanely high.

Yeah, like I used to work for developers and we would plan for a 5% contingency on a project. Now, sometimes 15% isn't enough because we can't build it fast enough to outpace how fast everything's going up. And that happened on our building. So I experienced it personally. So The real problem is that if it takes you several years, which it will, to do any of these option A, option B, or option C, the numbers go up substantially because this 9% we've assumed for construction inflation is compounding, right? It's not like it goes up 10% and the next year it goes up 6%. No, it goes up 9% in total every year. So this is compounding, and it's going to bite you because you can't do anything fast enough to get ahead of it. So even if these are wrong and we should calculate them differently, which I'm totally open to feedback if we should be doing it differently, no matter what you do, the only solution that actually gets you to spend your money sooner vis-a-vis the money goes further is option B. It's the only one that can happen faster than like five to seven years. for the rest of them.

But I'm also just thinking those inflated costs, we're still renting multiple sites. Correct. So that, those rents, right? So it's not just this, it's rents as well.

Yes. And so the rents are not on here. We did not take those into consideration. We didn't want to, we are not economists. We were building a very simple pro forma just to make a point. Go ahead.

I know this is specifically City Hall, but what happens with the plan for public works building?

Yeah, so there's some options there because particularly the administrative staff could fit into the 310 Israel Road. And so if we were to do that, I know recently the public works facility move from a one-story to a two-story. So we could go back to a one-story, which could save some costs in that building. And we need to continue to talk through exactly what that looks like and work with the team. It gives us a lot of different options. But the public works facility is more focused on the operations side of public works, the work that happens in the building behind City Hall right now. That would not be able to be accommodated in the 310. So we would still need the public works facility. It just wouldn't need to be as most recently.

And I realize this is really important, but that's also important.

Right. So valid, right? And, you know, coulda, shoulda, woulda, shoulda been built last administration, and it wasn't. I started in January. And I'm looking holistically about all the external sites of renting. And so it's yes and, and this is a larger priority because I'm trying to work with all of you to meet today's needs and 40, 50 years. And we have 270 staff and I have those silos happening where things are escalating and no one's talking to each other. You're sending email and email and email. If I can bring everyone together, we can bring everyone together, right, and have admin together, I think it's going to help our culture of work, right? Because we're supposed to be a service to our community. So I'm getting some feedback on social media about have everyone telework. I love that, and we've been doing that for years. And we have face-to-face conversations with our community. So it's yes ands. I am working with all of you and staff to bring everyone together to be a service to our community, knowing that those needs are changing, right? So to me, this is a larger priority than public works. So I'm not saying no, but I can save $8 million. We could save $8 million in that building.

The way my head goes, it's just a project. Like, we just went over the tip or, you know, the board. This moves up for me. And so it's just like one of those things, as long as it does, you know, it's still there. And I know it's not going to fall off the chart, but it's just like my head, okay, we're going to do this now. And then when, you know.

If we can get all of admin in a building, scale that back down, de-escalate those neighbors, right, work on that design, save a few million dollars. Yeah. That's where I would like Council to support that concept. Also, in 2015, there was a plan to do something for the City Hall, and that never happened.

Yeah, and they had problems then, and now they're compounded, right? Right.

The last thing, too, that's important to note, and I see Council Member Cathy has her hand up, too. Oh, yeah. But option D is, we're at a unique point where that building As price at a certain point, and there's no guarantee that that. There is a timing element. Related to this discussion, so I just wanted to highlight that as well. That this isn't something we can just say, oh, let's wait 2 years until there's a. a better financial outlook, and then we consider it, because that option D may not even be on the table, at least in its current form.

Well, and commercial buildings are kind of funny, because, like, we're all familiar, probably most everyone's a homeowner or knows how homeownership works, right? And so, you know, your house is worth something, whether it's occupied or not. And commercial buildings are completely different. So they're based entirely on rent. So this building is extremely depreciated because it's empty. So if it was full, it'd be worth $30 million. That's what it appraises at. But it's empty, so it's worth half that. And so the minute it gets a tenant, it will be worth $30 million again. And that's sort of how the commercial market works.

Joan, you have your hand up?

I just had a question about, I just wanted to pass on one question as it relates to the trails. And what we're doing now is, in any way affect that we don't need to build a community uh center so to speak out uh at the trails end does this does this affect some of the construction uh i'll try and answer that i think i understand your question councilmember kathy but the trails end property is a public works facility and then a park but the community center was never

Slated for that property. We still haven't identified the right location for a community center. That's an ongoing process. So, trails end is a public park and then the public works facilities. What's been currently planned for that.

I understand that, and I understand what the community center process is about. I'm asking, we have said there is a part of the construction at Trails End that is a community room or a part of a building that would be where people could gather. This was part of trying to have a selling point also, I think. And I'm just wondering how much what we're doing here can impact Trails End for the homeowners out there in some positive way. And that was just a question that came up there.

Thank you, Kathy. None of that is off the table, right? It's just moving, the option is moving admin together, right? And so the operation, so I haven't heard any discussion of removing like a space for community to gather there, like a room. So I haven't heard that that has been removed.

No, I don't think it has been removed. I missed passing on a question of scaling down some things that trails in. Could that be one of them if we have enough space in a new building?

Yeah.

I think, yeah, that's a great option. It's all on the table. Thank you.

Okay.

Yeah. And then Randall.

My question is just to confirm if

we went ahead and went with option D. We're actually going to be doing a cost savings of approximately $8 million by not adding on to the public works.

Removing that second story and moving all admin to consolidating admin.

And that's an estimate based on today's design, based on today's costs. So that'll continue to evolve as we fine tune it. But that's the early estimate when we look at removing the second story.

I can't do compounding interest in my head, but it'll be a lot of money in two years. If you don't build that second floor.

Angela?

Yes. I'm thinking the same way as Joan. And I wrote option D by existing building. No more leasing out church and school for special events. Community has meeting space. So there's enough room there for us to do that.

If there is one thing that that building has in spades, it's space. You guys got more space than you know what to do with. Or maybe you do know what to do with. That's a great problem to have. Yeah. I'm going to advance the slide. My clicker stopped working. Aha, I have the power.

So I made this small on purpose. You don't need to know.

I can't see.

This is like the back of house math, basically. And it just kind of helps us. to show kind of the information that went into it, into this process, I sent out a pretty detailed survey that then went out to kind of the heads of each department where they had to kind of assess what they have currently in their staffing needs, what they have needed in 10 years and what they have needed in 20 years. And then we added in like other specific rooms that they need. There needs to be a new council room, there needs to be IT storage, there needs to be records room. kind of putting that all that information into a spreadsheet, assigning kind of numerical values that we can give a rough estimate of like how much actual square footage you guys need. And part of that is kind of knowing the multipliers, knowing that how much space a cubicle is, but how much space all the additional spaces are. So like, Right now, you can look at that and you can say, okay, they only needed 42,000 square feet. That's 42,000 square feet of program space. That doesn't include hallways. It doesn't include mechanical rooms. It doesn't include restrooms. It doesn't include all of the other supplemental spaces. You generally use a 1.15 or 15% additional efficiency factor. So if you multiply that efficiency factor, The amount of space that, and this is for the 10-year calculations, I kind of actually ignored the current calculations because we don't want to design you a building for right now. We want to design you a building that you can comfortably grow into for the next 10 years. So that number is basically sitting at 48,000 square feet is what the city council space needs. That is not including the police station force. They're a totally separate column that I... didn't show on this graph because we've kind of associated them as potentially staying in this building, potentially building a new building. So we didn't want to kind of move those numbers. And if we move them to the 310 Israel Road building, we would have to make that building an essential facility. So that was one of the things we just kind of, they're a separate entity. So that's 48,000 square feet. The building is 95,000 square feet. So you've got some wiggle room and room to kind of fill it up nicely, be comfortable in that space, and then also use it for other things. That graph was very difficult to read and to understand. And part of the survey that we did was, who do you want to sit next to? Who do you work with the most? How does your day function better if you get to sit next to somebody that you work with on a regular basis. So that kind of plays into what we call an adjacency or bubble diagram. And basically, it kind of boiled down into this nice little bubble diagram where kind of the executive board wants to be near administration, finance, the attorneys and the communications departments. And then community development and water resources and transportation kind of want to be near each other as well.

I will point out my favorite thing which is that IT wanted to be here. I've already teased IT incessantly about them not connecting to anyone on the bubble diagram, but that was my favorite outcome from those meetings.

His point was, when we asked where you wanted to be next, he said, I wanted to be next to that, to the server room.

Should we be taking this first? Do you want to be around any of us? Great question, I assume I will be dead so. Do you have a timeline on this?

So this is a very rough schematic, basically where we took like the cubicles and the office spaces and the amount of conference rooms and kind of roughly laid out a plan that said, okay, we can fit in this space. This is the 10-year plan. So if in 15 years you have grown slightly more, you can lease the second half of that second floor. And so it has actually a really nice growth plan so that if or if you were like really growing like crazy, say we want that whole third floor. It has the ability to be segmented into a couple of different tenants and slowly taken over over time.

It can be difficult to anticipate growth. Peter, but I believe it would be like 30 to 40 years before you.

Yeah, and I think we were but it would take 300. And there was this phase. But we have to move across the street because we need to pick it up. So I don't know if that would happen. I was really hurt. So if we go to 70. And we're not moving everybody. Yes, we have a lot of that. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. You have to keep remembering we're leaving police here, right? And so we have to do the same thing.

And fire.

And fire.

Can I throw out some context here, too? Because I want to be careful. Anytime you put an image like this on the board, people kind of jump to, oh, this is what we're going to do, or oh, this is a plan. The question that we posed to Artisan's group was, could this building work as a city hall? And if it could, what's an example of how it could work? But there's a lot of... Yeah. there's a lot of time and process that we need to go into kind of the thought and where we put things and engagement with departments and programming. And so I just wanted to make sure and put the caveat out there that this was a high-level conceptual plan of put it at work and an example of how it could work.

And I think it will work. I mean, it's a great building. Yeah, 10 years I work in it. It's a great building. It will work.

It's in remarkably good shape, too. I mean, remarkably good shape for its age. it's in a remarkably good position to become a city hall, I will say. Sometimes Lindsay does these studies and it's like, yeah, you can fit everyone, but no department is near each other that should be. And there's lots of problems and there's no space to do these 10 really essential functions. And it didn't, this building didn't fight us that way.

No, it didn't fight us at all. It was very easy. Everybody just kind of, we like kind of put them all in and it was like, oh, it works. It fits. And that is, that's relatively rare for that to happen.

I believe they are on the second floor.

Yeah, and as Paul said, no one is married to this. It is important if you're a good architect to remain agnostic. There's a million ways to solve the same thing, and this is just one way you could solve it. One thing I will say about this

set up is that we thought through, uh, security concerns here. So there is kind of a dotted line around a public area. And then, you know, the private areas are behind doors. They're behind, uh, lockable lockable counters that basically you have, uh, you have the city hall employees kind of behind a wall and then you have your central core areas that are accessible by the public. And so it creates like a really clear, clean cut between, um,

And there's great security oversight, like you see at City of Olympia, where really everyone that, it's not a barrier, they're not stopping people from, but they are monitoring who's coming into the building and for what purpose. Also, there's a really, I'll just say it, a really cool opportunity for a city council chamber on the second floor that would have a lot of glass. And we have some experience with that. We would probably do ballistic glass around that. that's there. And so it could be a very welcoming, very light-filled space, very different than sort of the traditional city council chambers that were built predominantly when this building was built. People just didn't do any light. There's no windows. It's not great for mental health, which maybe isn't great for city council people because your job is already hard. So there are some wonderful opportunities that the existing structure does present. And then we pulled together some... Lindsay's previous work and just some example projects. Oh, I think we're almost done.

That's enough to take us to 7.03. That's how it goes, isn't it? So, you know,

biophilic elements in spaces.

These are all existing buildings similar to what we're looking at right now. So several of these buildings, we're talking about kind of like cutting a hole in the floor so that you have two floors and kind of connect those big giant floor plates that you have. And that's exactly what several of these are showing. They're showing existing buildings where they kind of retrofitted them and gave them a new life. And it can be extremely beautiful. It's very, It's very doable.

And this is not out of the budget that we proposed. Like this is what a nice interior remodel looks like if it's well done. These are some city council chambers.

See these modern ones? They look great. Got windows.

Like there's going to be people in them. That's amazing.

This is kind of a last little taste of... Well, river inspiration, forest inspiration.

You nailed the palette.

Well, and I think, you know, sort of what we were thinking about is you have to sort of honor the history of buildings, right? And so if City Hall's not going to stay in this building, the police station will, which I think is a great way to honor it. But also there are many things that define Tumwater and it is evolving and we can take those with us. We can take the evolving pieces with us to the new building and that can become a part of the narrative as well. I think that's our last slide. I think we're done.

The eye candy at the end. That was important.

Questions? Thoughts? So, looking for direction, does something stand out to tell staff what you'd like them to research further?

So, that building has three sets of elevators. So, there's one for the east one to do, actually four sets of elevators.

So, Peter, you would like to research more about option D?

No, I already know.

Option D for Peter. Angela.

Option D for me, but I would just like more communication with our residents. for them to know the why and the why now. You know, let's frame that. And I think that they will join us in this.

I had a clarifier too, just because I think it might help with some of the other. Option D doesn't mean we go out and buy it tomorrow. Option B, what we would try to do is put the building under contract so we would secure the price and a term that would give us an amount of maybe six months in order to give us the time to do the due diligence, have some communication, have some community process, and work with folks. And then at the end of that option period, if it makes sense, then we would have the ability to acquire it or not. But it would be a down payment that we would make. So I wanted to be clear that option B doesn't mean we buy it all tomorrow and spend 15. We're not ready to do that, and we would not recommend it.

You can certainly do design engagement pieces with the community, too. You can have kids come in. You can have community members come in and tell us what they think should be in the city hall.

I mean, Joan started that conversation of a space we had planned down the road on 99. What would that look like in a city hall? So I mean, Joan started that. So that's great feedback. Eileen, what are your thoughts?

I appreciate the fact that it's going to give us some time. I am your numbers. We're just trying to figure out how we're going to, because we're going into our budget season and how we're going to do this. It's so exciting. Very exciting. Thank you.

Billy, B. Brandon.

That's it. So, yeah, just B. I would agree with B as well. I want to make sure, again, going back to what Angela said about engaging with our residents and the public, make sure that that everybody is well aware of the current restraints that we have on here. Also possible liability for continuing to stay in this building if there is liability for any of the items that were brought up. And then just everything that I was reading online, basically people are like, what's the cost of this? Like, what is the cost to the average person, the average homeowner, the average resident? So- We're not reading texts.

Thank you for clarifying. We're not raising taxes.

Also, I think there's a compelling narrative. You know, we're private sector, right? So when we lose employees, that sucks. But you're public sector. And if you guys lose employees, then the city residents don't get as good of service. And so that's a very real, you know, threat. I think this building presents given its constraints.

And I think the other time. Yeah. Yeah.

Megan, can we get your thoughts and then we'll go back to talk?

Absolutely. I support exploring option D. I think it makes a lot of sense to continue to work through some of the questions and some of the pieces that we might want to engage the public on and figuring out how much of a fit it is and what are the unknowns that we can manage for and plan for and I think it helps us not kick the can down the road and I think everything that was shared already about engaging public to both get their input and bring them along in a time where the cost of everything is expensive. I think managing expectations, which I've heard other people say a number of times, is one of the best ways we can help ensure our community understands the decision that we're making, which does have implications for like employee health and wellness and culture and retention, and also has financial implications down the line. And I think presenting it in such a way along the lines of what we saw here, that while everything costs money, this costs less money in a number of ways will help people who might otherwise not be in support. Thank you, Megan. Joan, Kathy.

Thank you, Mayara. Lots of discussion has preceded this moment over the years. But I will join council in option B. And also I want to say that we have a bit of work to do in terms of the community. I mean, more, I think, than we realize, than I realize. This is a precious landmark to the city of Tumwater. You don't find very many people who don't like City Hall, our little City Hall. There's lots of emotion. There's lots of investment involved. that's been made here and so forth. So I just want us to be really sensitive to that and approach it like there's no dumb question or there's no someone's getting sentimental or something. Let it be. Let that be so. And then that gives us an opportunity to talk about, you know, the next group of residents and people in Tumwater have a chance to make a new mark somewhere. But I also want to talk about this in terms of Trails End, and we're going to get quite a few questions from there about this. And one of them is going to be, if you're going to save City Hall, is there not now then a plan that you could put together to put not the park, but the, you know, all the other part of it Behind city hall take down redo D whatever and keep central here down the street from 310 The You know, You know what I'm saying? That was one of the things that was talked about a while ago. I want that, for me, that needs to be part of the conversation. Because how many millions of dollars are still involved in doing... the Trails End and all of that. So anyway, I don't want to go into any detail, but I want that to honor the people of the city of Tumwater and the past history of this building in this place and to bring up again Trails End.

They are linked, right? Like timeline, funding, they are linked. And this is not our first city hall, right? It's not going to be the last. And we're not losing anything. we're looking to gain, right? So, thank you, John. Well said. Brandon, you had to interrupt me.

Lieta, I feel terrible because the delay here. I don't want to interrupt you. If I could just say a couple things. I was a little bit confused about some of the options. So, I don't know, A through D, it felt like there was people were talking about options that didn't match the lettering, perhaps. But then for Councilmember Cathy, I was just going to say that just as clarification, the existing space, all of City Hall, including what is in the back where Public Works currently is and the City Hall campus in its entirety, is not nearly sufficient space to meet our future needs. It actually doesn't even meet 25% of the minimum current needs based on standards. Just to provide some clarification.

I just wanted to be brought up again. Absolutely.

Brandon, we'll follow up with you. Thank you for that. I understand where Joan's going with that. So Brandon, Paul will follow up with you on that. Brandon, thank you.

And I'll add, too, that I actually appreciate Councilmember Cathy bringing that up because, as the Mayor indicated, those projects are linked and this creates an opportunity to engage in all those discussions and look at different options.

Yeah.

That's good.

All great. I just want to say that we are in a unique position as far as our financials, that we don't have any debt. I mean, we're in a really sweet position that the way we've managed our finances and everything, we are really We have to applaud our Troy and his team and just our way we run things. This is a good place to be and be able to look at this as an investment in our future.

Brandon, Council, you have a lot on your plates, right? You're dealing with today and you're also planning 30, 40, 50 years out. And this aligns with all the things that you've been working on, the budget cycle, strategic planning, right, the legacy that you're leaving this community. This all lines up and this all tracks, and this is an amazing opportunity for all of you to set a tone for our city. Anything else for the good of the order?

Can I add? It was just a thought earlier that I think it's important to acknowledge that it, You brought up the point of us not raising taxes. It also means we're likely going to have to make sacrifices in terms of the pace that we grow our staffing into the future. And that we're in a quandary right now because right now we can't grow because there's nowhere to put people. If we buy that building, we're not going to be able to afford them for a period of time. So I just wanted to highlight that. that the way this building gets acquired is through sacrifices and through economic growth in the city, not through raising people's taxes. So I just want to add some more context to that for folks.

Anything else?

I just want to say thank you for hiring Tumwater's only architecture firm to help you do this.

Can you say that one more time?

Thank you for hiring Tumwater's only architecture firm to do this study with you.

We have the picture of the color palette.

You can have anything you want. Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you.

It is 706. Media room at 707.

Thank you, everyone. Thank you, John. Great seeing you. All right.

Well, Peter.