TO: W. Calvin Horton, Town Manager
FROM: Bruce Heflin, Public Works Director
SUBJECT: Municipal Operations Space Needs Study
DATE: May 30, 2001
The Manager’s recommended fiscal year 2001/2016 Capital Improvements Program budget includes $80,000 for a comprehensive municipal operations space needs study to be completed in fiscal year 2001/2002. The purpose of this budget working paper is to provide the Town Council with alternative approaches to answer the questions of how much space will be necessary to maintain provision of municipal services, and the most cost effective and efficient manner in which to provide the needed information.
The Town recently completed a comprehensive facilities condition assessment study with the help of consulting engineers from Applied Engineering Management, Norfolk, Virginia. As a result of this work, we are now able to quantify the Town’s backlog of maintenance and repair needs and future facilities renewal needs with much more detail than in past years. Much of the detailed information in the fiscal year 2001/2016 Capital Improvements Program budget is a direct result of this study. We believe this information will enable the staff and the Town Council to be more effective in doing our long-range facilities planning and more efficient in the budgeting of limited resources.
The Facilities Condition Assessment Program has given us detailed information on our long-range facilities maintenance needs; however, it does not help us to identify the Town’s current and future needs for new or expanded facilities. We need a way to survey our needs, project the costs of filling them and plan to begin meeting our space needs in the most efficient way possible. The proposed Municipal Operations Space Needs Study would give us this information and enable us to include expected future construction needs in future years’ Capital Improvements Program budgets.
Expanding service levels, annexation of new neighborhoods, and advances in technology have all placed an increasing burden on the Town’s existing facilities. Some Town departments are operating from facilities that are less than adequate to support their assigned missions. Over the past few years we have added personnel in several departments operating from the Town Hall, including Inspections, Engineering, Planning and the Finance Department (Information Technology Section). Our ability to add additional office space in the Town Hall is nearly exhausted unless we are willing to sacrifice conference rooms that are already barely meeting the demand for meeting rooms.
The ongoing construction of Fire Station # 5 should meet our needs for the foreseeable future; however, we should be examining the possibility that we may some day need a sixth fire station or may need to expand an existing fire station to meet the needs of growth areas such as the Horace Williams tract. In addition, the Fire Department needs training and administrative space. We are currently planning a major renovation of the Police Station; however, this renovation does not address the fact that we have expanded the police force considerably over the past decade without any increase in the size of police facilities. The Police Department now has a shortage of office space, training facilities, locker rooms and parking space. The 1999 analysis of the building projected the need for about 10,000 square feet additional space by 2009.
Perhaps the most pressing requirement for a space needs study is the upcoming relocation of the Public Works Department and the Transportation Department from their current location at 1099 Airport Road. The property the Town recently acquired north of Eubanks Road could house the Public Works Department. We hope that additional property may be acquired that would allow us to also plan for the move of the Transportation Department and the Housing Department’s Maintenance Division. If we are successful in creating a new facility in this area, we would expect it to last for many years. We believe that a comprehensive space needs analysis is an essential first step to ensuring that the facilities we build at this new location will meet the service needs of the Town well into the 21st century.
The $80,000 for the proposed Municipal Operations Space Needs Study would provide funds for a qualified outside consultant to perform a comprehensive analysis of the Town’s needs. Such a study would examine the mission of each department, develop a list of facilities requirements to support those missions, compare our existing facilities inventory to current and future needs, and make recommendations for additions and deletions from our facilities inventory.
We expect that such a study would identify a significant list of facilities requirements that could not easily be provided in the short term and that it would be necessary to address these shortfalls with a long-range facilities construction plan. We also recognize that due to resource constraints, some of our requirements for new facilities may not be satisfied even in a long-range plan. However, we believe that a complete space needs assessment would allow us to survey all of our needs and set priorities according to our resource constraints, so that we could spend our limited resources wisely.
One option would be to reduce the scope of the proposed study by eliminating three large departments from the project. As mentioned above, we could use the space needs study prepared by Lucien Roughton in 1999 for the Police Department. The Public Works and Transportation Departments’ needs will have to be assessed as part of the planning for their new facilities. Preliminary work for both departments has already been completed as part of the search for land to relocate these departments. More space needs planning would probably be included in the design work which will occur once the sites are finalized. The advantage of this options is that the cost of assessing the space needs of the remaining departments would be reduced, probably by half, leaving a projected cost of about $40,000. The disadvantage is that the Town would still be buying expensive outside expert services for the work, whether as part of new facilities planning or as a free-standing project.
A second option would be to hire an intern to work a full year to conduct the inventory of current space available, and to work with the department directors to project future space needs. The intern might also be able to work with a task force of Town management staff to develop a long-range plan for meeting the most pressing of the space needs. The intern would do the least sophisticated work, and the more difficult work would have the advantage of the assistance of a staff work group. The advantage of this option is greatly reduced cost. Disadvantages are that this work would divert the staff from other tasks; we would not be able to produce a finished product as quickly as could be done by a consultant; the in-house staff has very little experience with such studies and might be perceived as having a vested interest. Therefore, the product might be less comprehensive and credible. This would cost about $10,000.
In light of the concerns the Council raised at the May 2 work session, we recommend the second option.