Everett To Spend $70k To Study Health District Building

The effort to find a solution to keeping Everett Public Works employees safe while finding a “higher use” for the current property at Cedar and Pacific streets took another turn this week.

Wednesday night the Everett City Council authorized spending $69,760.00 to study the feasibility of using the building being sold by the Health District at 3020 Rucker to house a portion of the public works staff.

The City Council actually took two actions Wednesday night. The first was to authorize the Mayor to sign the Purchase and Sale Agreement with Snohomish County Health District to buy the property. The current listed price is $8.5 Million dollars.

That is considered a placeholder pending the city’s inspection and studies on the property. The city will put $100,000.00 in an escrow account. Once paperwork is completed there will be a 120 day period for the city to complete all of its due diligence and studies. The city can cancel the purchase any time during that 120 day period.

The second action taken by the council is to approve spending just under $70,000.00 with DLR Group to conduct space planning, cost estimates for tenant improvements, evaluations and recommendations for building improvements and a look at the building’s systems. The time period for this work is 90 days which should allow enough time for the City Council to make a decision on moving forward within the 120 day window offered in the purchase and sale agreement.

Several council members said they were concerned that they weren’t getting all of the information needed from the Public Works Department on plans for moving people out of unsafe buildings in the Cedar street complex. Discussion of problems with the Public Works complex has been going on for years. In October of last year the city council voted down a plan to redevelop the Public Works facility citing the location of the facility as a gateway to the city and expressing a desire to see if there was a developer interested in buying the 15 acre site right at a main gateway to Everett and next to the light rail and multi-modal transportation center. Proceeds from that sale could then be used to purchase a more appropriate location for the public works facilities.

At the Wednesday night council meeting there was no discussion on what had happened to that sale idea or specific plans to accommodate the rest of the workers and equipment that occupy the current space.

In the meantime all involved acknowledge that City of Everett workers are operating in buildings that are not safe in the event of a major earthquake.

The City of Everett has a website dedicated to the Service Center Redevelopment project. You can review most of the studies and documents here.

Interested parties can also view the discussions of the Everett City Council in the meeting videos from August 31st and October 5th of 2016 to see what the council members said then about the project.