Published June 2005

$170 million county campus open for business
in downtown Everett

Photo courtesy of Soundview Aerial Photography/ DAN CROWELL Snohomish County government buildings now cover a three-square-block campus in downtown Everett that includes, left to right, the “old” jail, the new detention facility and the new east administration building, connected to the old west Administration Building. Oakes Avenue divides the campus. Another block of the campus, to the right but out of the picture, is filled by the county courthouse and the historic Mission Building.

By John Wolcott
SCBJ Editor

A new era of Snohomish County government services is beginning with the opening of a new administration tower, a huge public plaza, an expanded jail, an upgrading of older facilities and a dramatic revamping of the way residents will interact with county offices.

“The new county government campus is indicative of the evolution of Snohomish County. We’re growing up. We’re serving a more suburban and urban county as opposed to the once rural county that the old campus was designed for,” said county Executive Aaron Reardon.

But there’s much more to the impact of the new $170 million campus than its buildings, the construction payroll and the campus’ magnetism that already is drawing more people into the downtown Everett business core. The in-depth changes are the new service efficiencies built into the facilities, including a consolidation of related departments so that residents will no longer have to visit several different floors in the process of obtaining building permits, for instance.

“We promised our customers a new way of doing business with the county — more efficient, more effective and faster. Services are centralized and better able to serve the changing needs of the citizens in our growing county,” Reardon said, referring to a county population of more than 600,000 that is expected to soar to as many as a million citizens by 2020.

“I think the arrangement of offices in the new administration building makes it easier for people to do their business when they come to the county. Administratively, it will be a lot easier for them to get permits or apply for building plan approvals,” said Snohomish County Council Chair Gary Nelson. “I’ve already heard a lot of people commenting how happy they are with the new building.”

In a joint statement in the tour brochure prepared for the June 3 grand opening event, Reardon and Nelson credit NBBJ Architects, M.A. Mortenson Co., the county’s facilities management team and the city of Everett’s support staff for the successful conversion of the campus vision “into bricks and mortar.”

The Campus Redevelopment Initiative (CRI), as the expansion effort was dubbed, was designed not only to provide more space but also to bring scattered offices together and realign how services are provided to the public. More than 750 employees who had been operating from 18 separate offices throughout the city for many years are now on the same campus.

“That creates significant efficiencies for the operation of county government as well as more efficient services for the public,” said Connie Lewis, the CRI team’s communications manager during the four years of the project.

Dale Moses, project manager for the campus expansion, said residents will notice faster service and less moving back and forth between floors and departments to get their permits or other work done.

“So far, we’ve gotten nearly universal praise from the public and the staff,” he said. “Also, we have something that’s unusual for a county government building, an information desk at the first-floor entrance, staffed by George Ohlsen and Larry Dreyer. Half of the people who come in don’t know for sure where they need to go. These greeters are more evidence of our customer service theme.”

Customer Service Center 1, on the first floor of the new administration building, is a one-stop destination for all treasurer, assessor and auditor services, directly linked to the parking garage by elevators to the “plaza” level.

On the second floor of the new administration tower is Customer Service Center 2 for public works and planning and development services.

Human services programs have moved into the lower level of the new tower at Customer Service Center 3, providing information about help with heating and utility bills, weatherization programs, emergency financial assistance for veterans and other low-income services.

The project already has had a positive impact on county staff, too, Moses said.

“By grouping related departments together it not only helps the public but also helps our employees. Many people who were in, for instance, the treasurer and assessor offices have generally not even met each other. Now, because they work more closely together, they find they are helping each other deal with customers’ questions, all because we’ve integrated similar work areas. The people who moved here from offices off campus are now feeling more like a part of a family,” Moses said. “We’re even sharing receptionists between departments on each floor. It’s a smart way for government to do business.”

Mortenson, the general contractor and construction manager for the campus project, has earned rave reviews from many people in county government, Moses said.

“We interviewed three finalists and Mortenson was head and shoulders above the others. We talked to a lot of their previous clients, too. They came out looking so good we wondered if it would really work out that way. It did. They have worked with us to figure out the best way to produce a successful project for both citizens and the government employees. We couldn’t be happier with them,” he said.

Based in Minneapolis, with a Puget Sound office in Bellevue, Mortenson has been active for many years in prominent Snohomish County projects, including Providence Everett Medical Center’s Women and Children’s Pavilion, the Tulalip Casino and adding new paint hangars at Boeing’s Everett plant.

“From our perspective, as the contractor, this project was a real succes,” said Brett Sisco, Mortenson’s senior project manager for the campus project. “We finished on time and will be within our budget for the work we contracted for. Extra costs for removing contaminated soil and solving the spring water issues were outside of our project
contract .”

The “known” work was accomplished on budget, agreed Larry Van Horn, facilities manager for the county campus project.

“It was the unknown things that were difficult to deal with,” he said, “such as $2.1 million for removing contaminated soil and $2.6 million for solving water problems from an underground spring discovered during the building of the parking garage.” But, it wasn’t just one spring that broke through during excavation work, Moses said.

“It was a maze of them, like water coming into your basement from all four walls. Also, we had no idea there was so much contaminated soil to be removed, yet we’ve never found any record of a service station or storage area being on that site. Since it was contaminated with leaded gasoline, it’s clear it happened a long time ago, perhaps as early as the 1930s,” Moses said.

Sisco said he also sees the campus expansion as “a tremendous opportunity for changing the face of the whole county campus. It’s not often you get to do a project that has that much influence in the public sector. We take a lot of pride in delivering it successfully.”

Integrating so many departments has developed a widespread teamwork feeling throughout much of the government, Moses said, noting that employees are working more closely together.

“Bringing people into the building from outlying offices made a difference,” Moses said. “I know of two attorneys, for instance, working for the same boss who were four blocks apart and rarely saw each other.”

The $2.6 million previously spent annually for rental space will contribute to paying off bond debt on the new campus facilities. No tax revenues were used in the construction project.

While the new arrangements should prove to be more efficient, the public will need to do its part by learning where everything is located in both the old and new administration buildings.

The staffed information center on the first floor of the new administration building provides a useful starting point. Residents can also pick up copies of the new phone and location directory, which includes a map of the new campus.

Pedestrian bridges at each floor connect the new tower with offices in the “old” administration building. County Council offices have moved to the eighth floor of the new administration building, the top level.

The county executive’s offices will be moving from the third floor of the “west” administration building to the council’s previous sixth-floor offices.

Across Oakes Avenue, on the east side of the campus, the new $86.5 million jail expansion provides 640 new beds for inmates in a 10-story structure that was designed to look more like a government office building than a detention facility. The old jail facility provides another 400 beds, bringing the county’s overall capacity for handling inmates to 1,040.

Later this year, when funding is available, the first two floors of the old jail are expected to be renovated, providing upgraded offices and administrative space for support staff as well as space for the “work release” program for inmates, now housed on the campus in the old Carnegie Library building.

Snohomish County Business Journal/ JOHN WOLCOTT The Plaza Cafe, just outside the north entrance to the new administration building on the Snohomish County government campus, provides visitors, employees, jurors and attorneys a convenient place for food and beverages.

Van Horn, head of a department that has been at the forefront of planning and completing the campus expansion, said he thinks “citizens are in for a real treat ... because of the new Customer Service Centers, faster service and things like the Plaza Cafe.”

Reflecting back to 1999 when he first began working on plans for the campus expansion, he said the project has been “personally challenging but extremely rewarding ... but I think the teams we’ve built and the camaraderie we’ve developed could become models for accomplishing other projects in the future.” Now begins a new chapter for Van Horn and his staff, maintaining the new facilities.

“We’ve just added half-a-million square feet of space to our inventory. It’ll take a couple of years, in fact, to get baseline data on utility use and expenses to help us develop more efficient ways of operating,” he said. “For such a sophisticated project, it turned out pretty nice,” he said.

Although work is finished on the four-year, $170 million project, the largest public improvement project in county history, another $8.1 million worth of work has to be done at the site.

An additional $3.2 million in bonds will need to be sold to upgrade the west administration building adjacent to the new tower.

Also, remodeling is being finished on portions of four floors of the adjacent Snohomish County Courthouse to make space for new courtrooms, more jury space and a criminal hearings courtroom.

County government’s buildings now span three city blocks in downtown Everett. For the first time in many years, all its services are centered on one site instead of being scattered across the city.

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