Fulton County Commissioners will vote Wednesday on a proposal that calls for them to issues $77 million in bonds to pay for repairs to county buildings. The total cost of five years of improvements and preventive maintenance would be $273.8 million.
The cost to fix Fulton County's ailing buildings — and, officials say, to keep them from falling into disrepair once improvements have been made — will be nearly $300 million over five years.
A just-completed study shows that it will cost $97 million to repair damaged county buildings. The remainder of the outlays would cover annual building maintenance and improvements to the physical appearance of the facilities, including wallpaper and new fences.
"You're going to pay for it one way or another," said Dennis King, Fulton's facilities project director. "A building is like a body. You go to a doctor, and it don't get no better with age. It gets worse."
Years of underspending on preventive maintenance led to buildings with leaky roofs, unreliable elevators and broken heating and cooling units, King said. Wednesday, commissioners will decide whether they want to issue bonds to pay for $77 million worth of repair; $20 million was already part of this year’s budget.
Fulton County Commissioner Bob Ellis said bonding the money was a way to normalize spending across several years, and would keep the county from having to cut spending in other areas to be able to afford the needed improvements.
“I think it’s a good, well thought-out plan that gets us to a better point,” he said. “It’s still a huge number.”
Most of the money that would be bonded, a total of $49 million, would be spent next year, though improvements would happen through 2020. The repairs would take place at about 80 government buildings, though the bulk of the problems are at the Fulton County Government Center and its courthouse facility. Library upgrades will be paid for out of a separate library bond.
"The need is there," King said. "If we don't do something, it's really going to be a very, very bad mess."
As it is, visitors get trapped in Fulton County elevators, libraries and senior centers close because of leaky roofs or broken air conditioning, and rodents and bugs continue to plague some buildings.
The problems come from deferring maintenance from one year to the next. The county used to spend $15 million a year to maintain its buildings, but in the past decade, it’s only spent more than $10 million twice —- last year, and in 2005. One year, the spending fell to $1 million.
The assessment cost nearly $500,000 and was performed by construction consulting firm Faithful-Gould.
In addition to the money to fix existing issues, King’s proposal also calls for $2.5 million annually for preventative maintenance; $27.5 million annually to maintain and operate the buildings; and $7.5 million annually for appearance improvements. Those three categories would be part of the budget each year, and would go toward keeping the county out of the hole it finds itself in when it comes to its facilities. All told, including repairs, the cost would be $273.8 million over five years.
“We can lay out what happened in the past when you didn’t do it,” Ellis said of the need for increased spending. “We’re going have a track record to look at.”
King said the county will also sell about 10 buildings that are beyond repair. One of those is the Aldredge Health Center, which will be sold to Grady Hospital. The health center has closed some days because the heat didn’t work, and it was too cold for patients to disrobe. Patients will be transferred to a new building with better facilities.
To not spend money now, King said, would mean more county buildings would likely exceed their useful like in the future.
Additionally, he said, improvements will make for a better working environment for employees and a better environment for people who visit county facilities.
“Do you want your facilities to continue to look run down?” he asked. “Our brand image, to me, is as critical as anything else. Our brand image is sorely lacking.”
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