9/28/07 - County announces three possible motor vehicles office sites

(As Published by Cortland Standard, Corey Preston reporting)

Three potential sites for the county’s motor vehicles office were made public at Thursday’s legislative session, and will be presented to the community over the next month before the Legislature makes a final decision.

The Legislature voted to authorize County Administrator Scott Schrader to lock in prices for the sites, two of them in the city along River Street and the third along Tompkins Street Extension in Cortlandville.

The site on Tompkins Street is a roughly 3-acre parcel carrying an asking price of $300,000, while a 2.2-acre site that straddles Cleveland and River Streets has an asking price of $400,000.

An asking price has not yet been obtained for the third site, a portion of the BOCES Plaza on River Street.

“We still haven’t done any hard negotiating on any of these,” said Legislator Carol Tytler, who chairs the special committee that selected the sites, after reviewing a total of 31 options.

The Legislature had considered a fourth site, Tytler said, but the property, the former Cayuga Medical Center on Commons Avenue, was sold.

That property was attractive due to an already existing building, Tytler said, and carried a price tag of $680,000, which included $40,000 for an adjacent property.

The remaining three possibilities will all require new construction, Tytler said.

The county is in need of a 4,000-square-foot building for the motor vehicles office, along with space for approximately 50 parking spaces.

Schrader estimated that construction would cost between $100 and $150 per square-foot, suggesting that the building could cost between $400,000 and $500,000.

The Legislature will still need to decide whether it wants to have a building constructed in order to lease, or buy the property and construct its own building, Tytler said.

Schrader has suggested that purchasing would be a better decision financially, but Tytler said the county would look at its options with each site, noting, for instance, that the owner of the BOCES Plaza property has expressed an interest in either selling or building to lease.

The three primary criteria the committee considered in seeking sites were space for a 4,000-square-foot building, space for parking for 50 cars and access to public utilities.

OK, quick math lesson again for Scott Schrader - criteria is 4,000 square feet. Cost for new building is between $100 and $150 per square foot.

SO low figure - (4,000 square feet ) x ($100 per square foot) = $400,000.
High figure - (4,000 square feet ) x ($150 per square foot) = $600,000.

OOPS... another math error!

And I bet the $600,000 is on the low side of the cost. In today's world, you can't build residential property for this cost.