By Roland Murphy for AZBEX
The Scottsdale City Council has authorized $10M in General Fund monies to cover cost overruns for the City’s planned Fire Department training facility.
The project was originally approved as one of 58 in the 2019 $319M bond package. At the time, it was specified to include a 10KSF facility. That size was much smaller than the project’s actual need, and the planned space was expanded to 27KSF last year, and the conference room seating was expanded from 100 to 171, with another $5M added to the $18M originally estimated in 2018 to cover the changes.
With the design change and the ongoing inflation in construction costs across all markets and project types, the cost has now swollen to an estimate of $33M.
Members of the Citizen’s Bond Oversight Committee questioned the cost increases, according to an article in the Scottsdale Progress. Project officials had been tasked by Council in November to present the changes to the Committee and request its support.
After contentious discussions between Committee members and officials, the Committee voted to proclaim it did not have sufficient information to make a recommendation on using non-bond funds at the present time.
In the Feb. 14 City Council meeting, some Council members chaffed at the process and overruns. Member Barry Graham asked why a 10KSF facility was planned in the first place if it would be inadequate to meet the Fire Department’s training needs, according to an article in Independent Newsmedia.
Fire Chief Tom Shannon explained the original project scope was included in a clerical error and needed to be revised.
Asked by Councilmember Tammy Caputi to explain the need for the new facility as currently designed, Shannon said the Department has 144 of its 250 sworn firefighters becoming eligible for retirement in mid-2025 and that the facility is vital to maintaining trained personnel staffing levels.
Both in the Council meeting and in a constituent newsletter sent on Feb. 19, Caputi explained and defended the need and decision to fund the project. She said that, since the project was approved in 2018, construction costs have risen 46%.
She also wrote, “The second factor increasing the cost is that the design of the new fire training facility has grown to accommodate the necessary functions and the large number of anticipated recruits that the city will need to train. Whether we originally budgeted for a smaller building or not must be balanced with what we need today, and luckily, we have the resources to build it.
“Thanks to the foresight, planning, and excellent financial decisions of our city manager and previous council, we were able to weather the last few unprecedented years by building up large cash reserves to handle unforeseen emergencies. We’ve also had a few record years of post-covid sales tax revenues. (Note: 50% of capital improvement projects are funded by construction sales tax revenue, and collection of this tax lags by several years). We are in a strong cash position, which has allowed us to pay down $60M of public safety pensions, increase our cash reserves to 25%, and have a $60M buffer in our Capital Improvement Project budget for exactly these situations.”
Of the $10M addition in project funding, $7.4M will be redirected from a project to convert the Bunkhouse at McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park into a playground, according to Independent Newsmedia. The remaining $2.6M will come from the General Fund.