RELOCATION

At the April 15 meeting, staff presented two options. The first was to provide up to $5.5 million, minus the land acquisition cost, for construction of a building at the West County 15th Street Ag Center location.

This option provides certain advantages for the extension, most notably, its proximity to the Ag Center, Mcgaughey said.

The second option was to provide necessary funds to ready space at the current administrative building at 198 S. Main St. to accommodate the Cooperative Extension. This option uses space in the county-owned building that will be vacated when staff moves into the new building across the street in summer of 2025.

“Of course, that presents a lower cost alternative to accommodate extension office space,” Mcgaughey said. “With the 60-plus current building staff of this building relocating out, there’ll be plenty of available parking. The building, of course, sits in a safe, convenient location between a popular coffee house and the children’s museum.

“And while the exact price tag for space preparation depends upon the scope of any renovations desired, this option would save the county as much as $5 million,” he added.

Russ Engel, director of the Cooperative Extension, noted that the University of Arizona had already been moving forward with the first option and started the process to buy the Mesa Farm property.

“The proposal to sell the two acres has been approved all the way up through the president, provost, vice presidents, and to my understanding, it was scheduled for the June Board of Regents. That’s the final step, the final approval,” Engel said.

The only things left to do were a survey and appraisal before going to the Board of regents in June to ask for approval of the sale, he added.

He thought the supervisors had already approved the Cooperative Extension project in February, “but the minutes do say that you approved everything except Cooperative Extension,” Engel noted.

The $5.5 million budget, although it will not get them everything they want, will do.

“Our preference, by far, is to continue working with the designers. We will do absolutely everything we can to reduce the cost of building that building,” Engel said.

“I need a building that just has the infrastructure, just the utilities, the walls. We are going to provide all of the furnishings inside. We’ll probably put $2 million worth of equipment in there. We’ve got a million dollars of equipment in the plant pathology lab that we’ll move over there. We’ll then outfit all of the other labs with the equipment, all of the furnishing, all of the IT stuff,” he said.

Paved parking and other amenities can be deferred, he added.

“The beauty about going up there is it allows us to expand and do the future stuff we need to do on the 2 acres that you will own and the adjacent land that you avail. We’ve had lots of plans in the process that we’ve delayed on because we really don’t have the space and the ability to do it right now. Up there we would. We can put in demonstration gardens, greenhouses, cold storage. For 4-H, we’ve had plans for a rope course,” Engel said.

“The beauty of this is we’re locating the building right on the boundary line. So right out our door onto our land, we can do all these other things with grants and donations. We can do all these other things we’ve always wanted to do. I need the bare minimum to get my people in there in the labs that are critical. Putting all that, we will do all of the equipment, we will do all of the kitchen equipment. All we need is the infrastructure, and we will figure out how to outfit everything for our needs,” he added.

Supervisor Tony Reyes asked Gil Villegas, the county’s chief financial officer, to verify whether the county had $5.5 million for the Cooperative Extension project. “We won’t have to cut any other project down, we won’t have to look at anything else?”

Villegas noted that the county currently has $89.8 million to cover all the building projects, including the Cooperative Extension, but the interest earnings will be enough to cover the entire $91 million budget.

The supervisors unanimously approved a $5.5 million budget for the relocation project.