COUNTY AUTHORIZES CIVIC CENTER BONDS
By Lunch
Mono County is one step closer to realizing its dream of a shiny, new office building.
Mono County Supervisors authorized the issuance of $24 million in tax-exempt COPs (Certificates of Participation) at its regular meeting Tuesday.
Finance Director Janet Dutcher said that she met with officials from Standard and Poor’s last week, and that the rating process was expected to culminate yesterday (Friday, Nov. 16).
The County hopes for a AA- credit rating.
After several years of discussion and planning and the ultimate rejection of a lease extension at the Sierra Center Mall, the County has decided to build a new, 33,000-square foot, pre-fabricated office building to house all south county departments and services.
The building will be located at the McFlex Parcel adjacent to the Courthouse and Mammoth Lakes Police Dept.
The facility will have parking for 110 vehicles. And Dutcher said the building is anticipated to have a 40-year life span.
A design-build contract has already been awarded to Roebblen Contracting of El Dorado Hills for an amount not to exceed $20.5 million.
The reason the County is asking for $24 million in bonds is due to a few factors.
1.) The County doesn’t wish to start paying interest on the new building while it is still paying to rent space. So it will pay “capitalized interest” in the amount of $1 million to bridge the gap during the construction phase.
2. There’s a nice commission when it comes to selling municipal bonds.
Construction is expected to start April, 2019 and be completed March, 2020.
The County expects to pay $1.3 million per year in interest from 2020 through 2048.
As Finance Director Dutcher has stated previously, the County currently pays $1.3 million a year in rent for Mammoth office space.
The all-in cost of the new building is estimated at $38.7 million over the next 30 years.
For the sake of comparison to its initial forecast, the County had to scale back a wee bit to make the project pencil. As The Sheet reported in 2016, project consultant Todd Lankenau believed a 43,000-square foot building would satisfy the County’s needs.
However, as Assistant CAO Tony Dublino, that design had a “40% grossing factor,” meaning there were design considerations made for circulation, etc. The County has since pared the size of the building back by nearly 25%. I guess they’ve gone from Taj Mahal to Taj MaCorridor …
In other news … well, the real other news is that my wife is away at Goat Camp in Oregon and I’m playing single dad so we’re gonna do our best to fake the remaining column inches here. No problem. 33 minutes ‘til deadline.
First off, I’ve been thinking about the Alterra deal and how the expectation is that we’re going to see a whole bunch of visitors we’ve never seen before – that Ikon passholders will indulge their curiosity and visit all the places they’ve always dreamed of going but never quite got to.
So it was with some interest that I read a story in the Economist under the subject header of “Human Behavior” regarding a study by Danish Researcher Sune Lehmann.
Lehmann contends that human beings have an internal “location capacity.”
From the story: “The number of places which a person visits regularly remains constant over periods of months or years. What constitutes a ‘place’ depends on what distance between two places make them separate. But analyzing movement patterns helps illuminate the distinction and the researchers found that the average location capacity was 25. If a new location does make its way into the set of places an individual tends to visit, an old one drops out in response. People do not, in other words, gather places like collector cards. Rather, they cycle through them. Their geographical behavior is limited and predictable, not footloose and fancy free.”
How did Dr. Lehmann draw such conclusions? Smartphones, of course. They serve as excellent radio collars.
This makes me think of my own winter plans. A friend of mine has organized a group ski trip. The destination: Park City.
I don’t know anything about Park City. I can’t recall offhand if an Ikon Pass is good out there. Probably is. What I do know is that my buddy scored some free lodging. And he actually bothered to take the time to organize the trip.
This wasn’t a case of being influenced by a ski pass, or a long-held dream of drinking watered-down beer in Utah, or a vision of being swept away by incredible ski conditions. I love my home mountain. I don’t need to go anywhere else. I do so reluctantly.
This is merely an issue of being influenced by “location capacity” in that the group all got to know each other at the same place – college. It’s hard to imagine Park City cracking my top-25, ever. This is a one-off. Corporate strategy has zero to do with how this trip came about. I didn’t go research Ikon locations and toss a bunch of names in a hat and see which one I drew.
And yet … you can bet your ass there will be some number crunchers at Alterra HQ trying to decipher my behavior from a few pass swipes. And you can also bet Park City’s Tourism Director is gonna chalk my visit up to some incredible marketing campaign.
What I’ve been reading. Neal Gabler’s 2006 biography of Walt Disney. Reason is simple. I’m a transplant from New Hampshire and I think on some level I believe native Californians to be an exotic species.
Both my daughters are native Californians. And great mysteries.
I guess I equate Disney, even though he was a Missourian, with having a keen, fantastic influence on the California state of mind. So if I understand Disney, maybe I’ll come to have a greater understanding of my neighbors (and daughters).
I’ll give you a full report when I’m finished.
I am inspired by the fact that Disney was once labeled the second dumbest student in an elementary school class. That he was dreamy and lacked focus.
More dreams. Less deadlines.
