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Cass County offices: relocate or remodel
Cass County Correspondent BACKUS - Cass County could spend $37 million over the next 10 to 30 years to relocate the county and court offices and jail to a larger site or spend $20 million on the present downtown Walker site in the next 10 years and then be out of future expansion space.
Paul Apilowski of Wold, an architectural firm, and Gary Otterstad of CAM, a construction management firm, explained the options for the county board at the board's annual planning retreat Friday in Backus.
County offices, the jail and courts currently sit on about four acres in downtown Walker. Because the area already is highly developed, there is only a potential for the county to obtain, at most, about two more acres of land there.
To accommodate the buildings and parking area the county will need in the next 30 years, a minimum of 12 acres will be needed, according to Apilowski. The county has about 128 off-street parking spaces now, but needs 199. Employees and visitors use on-street parking spaces and city parking lots to make up the difference.
A parking ramp would cost $3 million. Additional ground parking would cost $462,000.
Cass' most immediate needs will be for more courtrooms and more jail space. The county expects the state to assign a third judge here within the next two years, but there is no third courtroom.
Existing courtrooms lack spaces to separate inmates from the public, defendants' families from victims' families and modern security systems.
Cass has state authorization to house about 60 prisoners in Cass' jail at Walker and another 60 in Crow Wing County's new jail. At the current rate of increase for numbers of prisoners in Cass, Apilowski said he believes the county would need space for a minimum of 226 prisoners in 10 years when the contract with Crow Wing runs out.
The county could build a five-story court tower in the parking lot behind the existing courthouse annex, followed by a jail addition in the courthouse front lawn to get the necessary court space and jail space for 2017, but there would be no more room on the downtown Walker site to ever expand there again, according to Apilowski.
Cost for the court tower would run $8.5 million. Cost to remodel and expand the sheriff's office and add another 166-bed jail would run nearly $12 million for a total of $20.5 million in the next 10 years, he said.
Because construction projects usually run about two years each, the county would be looking at a total of about four years during the next 10 when construction contractors would use parking lots close to the courthouse to set up their staging areas. The county would lose most of the existing courthouse off-street parking those years.
Court spaces in the old courthouse could be remodeled into more general county government office spaces, but costs for remodeling are not included in the $20 million.
If the county builds away from downtown Walker, the state has offered Ah-Gwah-Ching property for $1. The county could designate a 12-acre section of that 170-acre site for county government, court and jail. There would be space for 353 parking spaces.
A whole new complex could be built at once or buildings could be constructed in stages to interconnect. If the staged construction program were implemented, the court system would be the first building, followed by a new 226-bed jail within the next 10 years. That and remodeling in the existing courthouse would cost an estimated $29 million.
The general county government and health, human and veterans services offices would move in 30 to 40 years. Estimated cost to build those new offices is about $9.5 million.
To build the entire $37 million new complex using 25-year bonding within the next 10 years would add about $97 additional property taxes to each property owner's bill on a $200,000 residence and about $448 to the tax bill for a $500,000 business.
To build only a new court complex and jail at the new site in the next 10 years on a 10-year bond would cost $56 more on residential property taxes for a $200,000 home and $260 more for the $500,000 business.
Administrator Robert Yochum met Monday with city of Walker Administrator Terri Bjorklund to begin the necessary process the county would have to undertake to have the Ah-Gwah-Ching site annexed to the city.
Courts and state statutory offices must be within the county seat city in the county where they are located, Yochum said. Though Ah-Gwah-Ching is a distance from the main part of Walker, it does abut city sewer ponds.
The unanswered question at this time is whether the state will accept the sewer line right-of-way between the ponds and city limits as making the pond area abutting to city limits. Otherwise, the city would have to annex more land than the Ah-Gwah-Ching site to make the city properties contiguous or get special state legislation to permit courthouse offices to be in Shingobee Township.
State law requires a special referendum to move a county seat.
The board is expected to vote at the Feb. 6 regular meeting to adopt a concept of whether the county should expand to the limits of land at the present downtown site or should begin steps to move to another larger site such as Ah-Gwah-Ching.
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