Legislators kill real estate deal: Jackson County offices will stay in KC courthouse
Jackson County legislators on Monday rejected a plan to buy and renovate a downtown office building to house county departments now sharing cramped space in the downtown Kansas City courthouse.
Budget Committee chairwoman Theresa Galvin led the opposition to kill the proposal from County Executive Frank White. She said the project’s $15 million cost — $9 million to buy the building and $6 million for renovations — would be better spent making needed improvements at the 15-story courthouse, such as installing a fire suppression system.
“I don’t agree with spending taxpayers’ dollars like this,” she said.
Six of the seven legislators at the meeting rejected the proposal. Charlie Franklin voted for it. Scott Burnett and Tony Miller were absent.
The courthouse has been the headquarters of Jackson County government since it was dedicated in 1934. County departments and the legislature share the building with the 16th Circuit Court and Jackson County Prosecutor.
The county also leases office space outside the courthouse and has some operations in the historic Truman Courthouse at the center of Independence Square.
White had proposed purchasing an 81,000-square-foot office building at 1300 Washington St. to house county departments that now occupy the basement and first two floors of the downtown courthouse. The move also would have allowed the county to consolidate operations and quit leasing so much space elsewhere.
The assessment department, especially, needs more room than it has in the courthouse now, assessment director Gail McCann Beatty told legislators. Some of her employees work so close to the restrooms that they hear toilets flushing all day and endure the odor.
“I have tried to hire staff who have toured our space, and then decided not to come and work for us because we currently have 75 people in our office. We don’t have any place to put them anymore,” she said. “Last week, I had to put 19 people in a conference room that’s supposed to hold 10. We simply can’t continue to function this way.”
But Galvin said a better and more affordable solution would be to find new office space for that department, rather than buying a building that she said was bigger than the county needs. A recent facility assessment of the courthouse found that the county’s overall needs for space in the next decade are only two thirds of what the new building would provide, she said.
Completed by a consultant last August, that facility and space needs assessment found that the courthouse needs about $256 million in fixes and upgrades to bring the 88-year-old art deco officer tower up to today’s safety standards and to better utilize the space.
The 13th and 14th floors are empty. For decades they were home to the county jail and haven’t been used for anything but storage since prisoners were moved into the Jackson County Detention Center 40 years ago. Other floors and building mechanical systems need major work.
County Administrator Troy Schulte said the plan was to do that work in phases over the next 10 to 15 years on a pay-as-you-go basis. The county in the last several years had to replace the building’s elevators, pipe in cold air when the air conditioning system broke and do extensive repairs to courtrooms damaged by leaky plumbing.
“It’s just finding the resources over time to plow back into this building,” Schulte said. “It was built in 1933, and I bet they started deferring maintenance in 1934. So it’s gonna take us a while to catch up.”
This story was originally published March 21, 2022 at 2:28 PM.
