OUR VIEW: County leaders made a wise move (vote in poll)
Intel Buildings are a great investment
Congratulations to the El Paso County Board of Commissioners for finding a steal on buildings they needed to replace aging, inadequate facilities their agencies long ago outgrew.
Commissioners voted unanimously Tuesday to pay $25 million for several buildings and a parking garage on the former Intel campus on Garden of the Gods Road. In doing so, they solved problems for a bargain-basement price that otherwise posed ominous financial ramifications.
Some of the county’s current buildings, such as the building used by the coroner, were built when the population of the county was smaller by hundreds of thousands of residents. The facilities lacked the capacity for the volume of work demanded today by a county with a population that has surpassed 600,000 and is likely to continue growing. Renovation of several facilities would have involved federally mandated asbestos removal (ridiculous but true). The cost of renovating just the Health Department could easily have exceeded $20 million.
Building new facilities to resolve the county’s most critical physical-plant needs was estimated at $84 million. Leasing was also studied and determined to be a costly and wasteful option, and doing nothing was also getting increasingly expensive.
(Please vote in poll to the lower right in red type. Must vote to see results. Thanks!)
Yes, we’re in a recession, and new government expenditures may seem unwise until the economy improves. But it’s a fact that this depressed economy has created an abundance of vacant commercial real estate, such as the Intel buildings, and the surplus has dropped prices to unimaginable lows. If ever there were a time for the county to invest in vacant real estate, this is it.
With its wise decision to buy Intel’s vacant buildings — a move that requires no new taxes or even smoke-and-mirrors taxes — commissioners solved an array of pressing problems and saved taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. Job well done.
— Wayne Laugesen , editorial page editor, for the editorial board. Friend him on Facebook
