Financial- COPS (Official Statement/Drafts)

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~~~ ~ ~ ~ related to support, or lack of support, for a transit facility: their motivation is to restore needed capacity to the downtown street system. WHY COURTHOUSE SQUARE7 Salem Transit needs a new and better transit facility, and hopefully that need has been reasonably documented in the preceding sections of this report. The nced for space to accommodate growth in the routes and ridership...the critical ne.ed to address the safety deficiencies that pertain to the Cheniot Station... and the need to respond to a mandate from the "owner" of the property we occupy-these and other concerns motivated the District to examine its options. ' What those "options" are, in t~rms of a site, have been ~camino3 on several occasions in the past twenty years. The desirability of the Senator block as a preferred site for a downtown transit center has been documented in a variety of studies dating back to the 1970's (see Attachment 2). When a final site review initiated by the District in the Summer of 1995-- involving a select committee representing a cross-section of the downtown community-- confirmed the appropriateness of the Senator site, discussions were opened with the owner of the block. That owner, of course, was Marion County, and they were at a point in their own development where a joint project was of interest to them An RFP to seek a developer for the project was released in Spring 1996, and the Courthouse Square project was underway. ~ Perhaps the final question to address within the general area of "need" is to ask why a "Courthouse Square?" Why a joint development project which involves two public partners and a private component to the project? . The answers to these questions are a mix of objective and quantifiable responses, with a few subjective suppositions. On the objective side, we expect Courthouse Square to save the public money, through joint construction and use of a number of facilities. Common spaces, lobbies, elevators, foundations and roofs, environmental analyses, parking structures, design costs, HVAC systems, electrical compone,nts--all will be paid for once, and shared between the two public partners. Areas which can be jointly used, such as delivery areas, a wellness center, mail and reprograplric rooms, and board rooms and conference rooms, will save both governments construction and operating costs. Several thousand square feet of lease space, own~ by the District and leased to private retail businesses, will generate revenues that are expected to offset the complete operating cost of the transit portion of the facility. Although no computation has been made to detennine the savings, logic suggests that the partners and the public will save substantially from the sharing of building components and facilities. Other abjective benefits pertain to the project. • The merits of the joint development concept earned the Salem/Keizer area nearly $8 million in Federal grant funds, a significant portion of which stands to be lost if the transit center is not developed on the Senator site. While neither government would espouse the expenditure of gant funds simply because they are available, it remains a fact that this project has been approved by the federal funding agency and the authorizations are in place ~