Sedgwick County’s plans in flux for former IRS building

Plans for the Sedgwick County-owned former IRS building in downtown Wichita are evolving, but dumping the building is not on the immediate agenda, according to a majority of county commissioners.

The building at 271 W. Third St. probably won’t be the site of a new downtown-area car registration tag office, as originally planned. And the first floor, a warren of small offices and cells, may not be immediately renovated.

But the county is looking for more economical ways to use the other five floors of the building, including possibly moving the administration of the Comcare mental-health department in and using Comcare’s current building as a mental-health crisis center.

The county bought the building in December for $5 million and renamed it the “271 Building” to divorce it from its previous federal identity. Architectural plans presented to the commission last month pegged the cost of renovation at another $6 million, including the tag office, which was slated to take up the whole first floor and part of the second.

Other projected tenants included the Metropolitan Area Building and Construction Department, 11,150 square feet on the fifth floor; Metropolitan Area Planning Department, 13,000 square feet on the sixth floor; and the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office of Professional Standards, 1,650 square feet on the second floor.

The plan caused some sticker shock for the commission’s conservative majority and changes are in the works.

County Treasurer Linda Kizzire initially expressed delight over moving to the 271 Building and getting out of the cramped and notoriously parking-impaired tag office at 200 W. Murdock.

But after a staff meeting where commissioners expressed concerns about parking and the cost of renovating the first floor of the 271 Building, she has asked for a request for proposals for a stand-alone tag office site with more parking and space to expand.

She said a move to the 271 Building now appears highly unlikely.

Some commissioners have worried that there might not be enough parking to serve a tag office and the traffic for the 271 Building’s other functions, despite assurances from county management that it could accommodate the cars using a combination of the building’s own parking and nearby city-owned lots.

Under the parking plan, the 82 spaces adjacent to the 271 Building would have been reserved for tag office customers. But it was never clear how that restriction would be enforced to make sure people didn’t use that parking to go to the planning or building departments.

Two of the current commissioners, Richard Ranzau and Karl Peterjohn, voted against buying the building in the first place. And their conservative majority colleague, former state legislator Jim Howell, has complained that he thought the building purchase was rushed through specifically to get a deal done before he took office in January.

The turmoil has touched off wide speculation in business and real estate circles that the commissioners would unload the building, probably at a significant loss — and blame the cost on the previous commission majority, the more moderate triumvirate of commissioners Tim Norton, Dave Unruh and former commissioner Jim Skelton.

But Ranzau and Howell said last week that getting rid of the building is currently not being discussed.

“There’s no plan to get rid of the IRS building that I’m aware of,” said Ranzau, the commission chairman. “We’re weighing options right now as far as who to move in there and trying to do it at the best cost and making sure whatever plan we come up with is really viable financially and physically as far as the requirements and parking.

“Different commissioners have different concerns.”

Commissioners said the main priority is to find a space to unite the building department, a consolidated department currently split between county and city workspaces.

“Right now the plan is we’re looking at finding a space for MABCD (in the 271 Building),” Ranzau said. “And then we’re going to look and see if there’s better places for the tag office, but all the other stuff is still under consideration.”

Howell said he doesn’t think the county could get near what it paid for the 271 Building. He said he has talked to some local developers and “they wouldn’t spend a million on it.”

He said selling the building would be a last resort, only to be taken “if we end up with a facility we don’t have a need for.”

Like Ranzau, he said his focus is to try to find a way to use the building as economically as possible. He and Ranzau said they’ve requested and are waiting for specific information on how much it would cost to move the building and planning departments into the upper floors.

Those floors have a much more open plan from their previous use as federal office space, and Howell said he thinks they can be converted to county use fairly quickly and cheaply.

He said the major cost of remodeling obviously will be the cluttered ground floor, part of which was used for immigration offices and some of which was used for holding cells with toilets that will have to be removed.

‘A good price’

Unruh said the previous majority got a “heck of a good price” on the 271 Building.

“It wasn’t a rush-rush deal,” he said. “We started a year and a half ago.”

A March 2013 request for proposals drew 30 responses from building owners all over the city, he said.

“We ranked all the properties and came back with two properties out of those 30 that would best fit us,” Unruh said. “One of them was way up at 35th Street and Rock Road in that commerce park up there and the other high-ranking property was 271.

“I do know that we’ve got a commissioner who says, ‘Well, you did that in December and you just tried to hurry through and get done before I got here.’ Well, I’m just saying we found a property after a long search and the word to us from the brokerage was that they wanted it closed before the end of the year.

“There’s no need to just stop the process and just say, ‘Oh, there’s an election in November so let’s quit what we’re doing,’ in my opinion.”

He said the combination of price, location and sturdiness of the building made it a bargain for the county.

“You show me any other building that’s built like that for $50 a square foot, and I’ll try to buy it myself,” he said.

This story was originally published April 26, 2015 at 12:43 PM with the headline "Sedgwick County’s plans in flux for former IRS building."