EVERETT — Mothballing Snohomish County’s downtown courthouse project would cost taxpayers $26.4 million — if elected leaders were to give up now.
For that sum, taxpayers would get years of interest obligations on unspent bonds, ownership of condemned properties with no immediate public use, and designs for a structure that may never get built. That is, essentially nothing.
And that’s if elected leaders pull the plug within two weeks. Wait longer, and the price is bound to go higher.
“We’re just exploring options here,” County Councilman Terry Ryan said during a brief public meeting on Thursday. “We’re not saying it’s mothballing. We just want to make sure we understand all of our options, what the cost is for every option. This is just one of those options.”
The discussion could continue in the coming week.
Plans to build an eight-story, 250,000-square-foot building north of Wall Street have been in limbo since December, when the Everett City Council took emergency action to require more than 300 parking spaces. The county had designed the $162 million project with about one-tenth of that parking capacity, reasoning that they were merely replacing the old courthouse across the street, with no added staff or services.
Everett Mayor Ray Stephanson said he was caught off guard by the lack of parking because County Executive John Lovick’s administration led him to believe the courthouse plans would include substantially more. The city’s concern includes accommodating events at nearby Xfinity Arena and the Edward D. Hansen Conference Center.
Already tight, the courthouse budget lacks the tens of millions of dollars to build the extra parking capacity Everett wants. There’s no political appetite to push the budget higher.
That has left the County Council to decide how to resolve the impasse, with costs rising the longer they wait. Council members also have pushed Lovick for a recommendation on how to proceed, but have yet to receive one.
Throughout February, staff from Everett and the county have met to discuss possible solutions.
Everett has dangled a partnership deal, similar to what Stephanson said he thought was in the works last year.
In that scenario, Everett would build a mixed-use retail and parking structure fronting Hewitt Avenue, on the back side of the proposed courthouse site. The county would lease 300 spaces from the city in the future city building’s parking garage. The redevelopment proposal would involve demolishing some historic Hewitt Avenue buildings.
City officials have said that the new parking requirements would still apply if the county were to build the courthouse in a different downtown location, such as the plaza next to the existing courthouse. The city’s emergency ordinance requires government buildings of more than 25,000 square feet to provide at least one off-street parking space per 800 square feet of floor area.
Several former options have reentered the discussion.
County Councilman Ken Klein has suggested remodeling the 1967 courthouse building and adding a new three-story addition next door. That possibility was considered and later ruled out by other elected leaders before Klein and Ryan joined the council at the beginning of 2014. The price of a remodel with a new three-story wing was originally pegged at $75 million, but that’s no longer considered a reliable number.
At one point in 2013, council members appeared ready to settle on building the new courthouse on the plaza next to the old courthouse. One drawback of that proposal was that it would put a major construction site within 10 feet of the existing courthouse, while it remained in service.
The plaza site was, however estimated to cost about $30 million less than the one ultimately chosen: a county parking lot across the street from the county’s downtown campus. The property is on the north side of Wall Street, between Rockefeller and Oakes avenues. It required buying out six properties at a cost of roughly $3.6 million. It also would take out a county-owned parking lot with more than 130 spaces.
The condemnations, together with design work, account for about $8.6 million in expenses so far, said Sharie McLemore, a County Council analyst. The county also needs to pay 10 years of interest on the $75 million in bonds it took out in the spring of 2013. Together, that means the county, at this moment, has either spent or committed to spending $26,358,350 on the courthouse before turning a shovel of dirt.
The original ground-breaking date was supposed to be later this year.
Noah Haglund: 425-339-3465; nhaglund@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @NWhaglund.
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