Borough eyes $7.2 million for expansion

PALMER — It’s taken a while, but the Mat-Su Borough Assembly seems to have settled on at least a partial solution to its office space problem.

The assembly voted this past week to seek a design for an expansion to its downtown Palmer headquarters. It’s an issue the assembly has been examining since at least 2008. Exactly where on the property the expansion would go was left open. But the borough set a ballpark price of $7.2 million to give a sense of the scale of the project.

“If you look out into the audience, you’ll see why we need to do something. The meeting space is overflowing,” said Jim Colver, who sponsored the ordinance that eventually went through.

He said the building has numerous problems aside from a sub-standard meeting space. Temperature control is a problem, he said, noting that offices get very warm in the summer. He said in an interview prior to the meeting that he’s heard of a staffer growing tomatoes in his office.

His initial idea had been to specify that the addition be built onto the building’s west side, into what’s called the courtyard. But assemblywoman Cindy Bettine successfully moved to make the ordinance less specific on that score.

She said she didn’t want to “have borough staff run down the rabbit trail, then have the numbers come back that it’s not the best viable option.”

She actually objected to putting a dollar figure on the project as well, but Colver managed to convince his colleagues that the $7.2 million figure was an estimate to give designers a good idea what size they were looking for.

He noted that the going rate for commercial space is $300 a square foot so, doing the math, that $7.2 million could buy the borough an additional 20,000 square feet or so.

Bettine argued that the assembly should spend some time hashing out the problem in a work session, noting that the addition won’t be the only cost since the main building is in need of renovation.

“We really need the big picture in front of us. We need to know how much we’re going to spend on this building,” she said.

Assemblyman Ron Arvin said that once the workers aren’t so crowded into the building it would be much easier to renovate the building piece by piece over time.

Assemblyman Mark Ewing said he thought the borough should look for a new facility outside of Palmer, since growth in the borough’s population has been mainly around Wasilla and points west. He said he couldn’t support adding onto the existing building.

“I’m going to point to the state, which has offices in Anchorage and in Juneau,” he said.

Eventually the ordinance passed with Ewing and Bettine opposed. The assembly will have to sign off twice more — once on a design and then again to begin the project — before construction begins.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.