Getting settled in, so we can go ahead and start our work session.

Um, and all of us are present.

So I think we'll just go ahead and start with our city hall check-in.

Good afternoon, Mary and Council.

Matt Stewart with real estate and housing.

Tonight we're going to discuss uh the future city hall development and the highest and best use analysis that you had asked us to do when we met back in November of last year.

I'm joined tonight by Katie Brooks, our economic development officer, and in person I have Garrett Rapsilver and Colin.

I'm sorry.

Will Quinn with Cone Resnik and HNRA.

And then online we have Lester Cow, uh, Benjamin Cole, and Noemi Plaza with our other consultant groups.

So they'll be chiming in if there's any questions that come up.

So just be on the lookout for them chiming in as well.

Purpose of tonight's is really to review the findings of the highest and best use analysis, kind of narrow down the list of properties we'd like to evaluate as a future city hall site, and then identify kind of next steps.

So we've sort of proposed kind of a five-year work plan, and we'd like to go up through those steps and kind of get direction from council tonight to want to proceed.

So I'll give a brief history and background of our facilities to date and where we were with the process.

I'll talk about the space needs and how we sort of set the parameters for how we wanted to model this.

I'll hand it over to Katie to kind of walk through some of our economic prosperity goals and the takeaways that we're hoping to achieve with this process, and then I'll hand over to Garrett to talk through the highest and best use analysis, and then staff will bring it back to kind of overlay our recommendation and walk through those next steps before handing over to council for some future discussion.

I'll pause at kind of each rate for each of these.

So if there's discussion related or questions related to what we just reviewed, we can take in a few minutes to kind of walk through that.

So as part of our history and background.

So the building we're in today was constructed in 1990.

At the time, we had just over 25,000 people.

Uh or I'm sorry, the buildings over just over 25,000.

Our population was just under 30,000.

Over the years, we've acquired the rest of the buildings on the block except for the dry cleaner at the very corner.

So those buildings have all totaled about 18,000 feet as part of our annexes here on this block.

We've also been leasing the building across the street, the Wall Street Annex since 2014.

That's about 15,000 square feet.

So in total, our assets here downtown that we use in uh as part of our operational administration role is just about 60,000 feet.

Usable for office space is about 50,000.

So that's where we're at today.

Kind of pre-COVID, about 10 years ago, we started doing a lot of our space programming.

So that included both our public works, our city hall, and our police.

So in 2015, we updated our downtown program report for city hall.

At the time we had 185 employees, and we looked at what a build-out of a new facility would look like in 2050.

At that time, it recommended evaluating something around the 85,000 square feet mark.

A few years later, uh, based on uh us relocating transportation, our other public works up for utility departments to public works campus, we did a master plan for PD, which looked at them expanding into 15th Street and the transportation building there as well.

Um and that looked at a build out for 2040, and at the time we had about 135 officers on staff.

In 2020, 2021, we began the city hall search site for this location.

Uh this was at the direction of council, and we went ahead and moved forward with a proposal for advisory services with Cushman and Wakefield.

We evaluated a variety of sites in around Bend that was based on that 2015 program report.

We really sort of narrowed it down and focused on the core area and the Bend Central District.

Uh as part of that, what came in out of that is focusing on the properties in and around the former Rainbow Motel.

Uh there on Franklin Greeley for second street was sort of the focus.

And it also kind of evaluated what a joint venture or P3 would look like.

So introducing that kind of topic as part of our development scheme.

In 24 and 25, we completed acquisition based on those recommendations.

So to date, we've acquired about 3.2 acres on two uh pieces of property, two acres continuous around the former Rainbow Motel, which is now the Franklin shelter that we currently are in partnership with.

And then we have a one roughly one-acre, 1.2-acre site that is the former uh gas depot there on First Street and Hawthorne.

At the same time, in that time frame, we went ahead and updated our program report to kind of adjust with because with COVID, we started experiencing different growth than we originally anticipated out of that 2015 report.

That looked like a bail-out for 2060.

And at that time, it was recommending a much larger facility at 134,000 square feet.

And as we met with council, we moved forward with bringing in the consultant team to kind of evaluate how do we move forward with potentially building that city hall and what would that would cost.

In November, we came with you with those kind of results.

What kind of came out of that was the cut very the cost, which was a little bit out of our range to go ahead and move forward with 134,000 square foot site.

Based on council's direction, we really we asked to kind of expand our evaluation of properties and look at what we own in general here within the city limits.

That included downtown, the properties we own in the Bent Central District, and at 15th Street.

And as part of that, council asked that we sort of evaluate all those properties around this highest best use analysis.

So looking at what the opportunity cost is, development potential of each site, and then what is the public benefit that each site could offer with or without a city hall in it.

We also asked us to kind of look at what the impact would be if if development occurred beyond our limits here in downtown.