Boone County goes on a buying binge involving buildings
On the heels of a dire report from MU Truman School economics professor Judith Stallmann about declining sales taxes, Boone County government has purchased yet another expensive downtown property for which it has no plan.
The county will pay $685,000 — about $20,000 over the appraised value — for the 6,000-square-foot Johnston Paint building, spending most of a $700,000 surplus from 2006.
With unmet needs for road work, mental-health care, space and equipment for the Boone County Sheriff’s Department, and an eroding sales tax base that has alarmed many local officials, the county’s outlay of nearly three quarters of a million dollars seems poorly timed and ill-advised.
You’ve got jail
Stockpiling downtown property for years, the Boone County commissioners have created a multimillion-dollar real estate “reserve” subject to the political whims of an elected, partisan government.
The oldest part of that reserve, the long-empty third floor of the Roger Wilson County Government Building, is just now getting occupants—13 years, and more than a few jokes, after its completion.
“They have an empty third floor at the Boone County Government Center,” a local resident wrote in a Dec. 6, 1996 letter to the Columbia Daily Tribune about a jail space shortage. “Why not house work-release inmates there? Just put up a few bunks, and you’ve got a jail!”
The current buying binge started in 2004, when the county commissioners paid $262,650 for a property at 217 N. 9th St., which formerly housed Jerry’s Hair Studio.
“We want the property for future use,” Southern District Commissioner Karen Miller said at the time.
But no future use materialized. The county sold the building less than a year later to attorney Bob Murray.
In 2005, the county purchased three more downtown buildings.
Spending $2.05 million for 16,000 square feet, the county commissioners picked up the Ford, Parshall and Baker law offices and the Lifestyles Furniture building. A third $670,000 acquisition — the Guaranty Land Title building at 607 E. Ash St. — was the only property that the commissioners even “suggested for a county function,” the Tribune reported, “but nobody knows what.”
Good business or monkey business?
County government’s land grab has removed some 30,000 square feet of valuable downtown property from private ownership and the retail marketplace, reducing property and potential sales tax receipts at the worst possible time.
It has also turned Boone County into a commercial landlord with a dicey track record.
The county commissioners leased the former Lifestyles Furniture building at 101 N. 7th St. to Fera Technologies, which shut its doors last summer, skipping out on $23,280 in past-due rent and $271,537 in remaining lease payments.
After sitting vacant for more than a year, the building will get a new tenant — the City of Columbia — but at a steep price. In an extraordinary concession for a property in The District, county commissioners will spend $110,000 on renovations and office equipment.
Not one dime of sales tax will be generated in return.
Constant conflict
As a source of conflict, Boone County’s real estate buying binge may have few equals. It has divided commissioners, committee members and the Special Business District for years.
Last year, Northern District Commissioner Skip Elkin said the unplanned acquisitions were “not critical in nature,” questioning the added expense — then about $3.5 million. He also worried about asking voters for a $14 million tax increase to fund even more office space “while the county had so much space it wasn’t using.”
At one point, Miller echoed his sentiments. “We can’t go to the voters with” a request for “an additional building when we’ve got an additional building across the street that’s empty,” she told the Tribune in November 2005, referring to the vacant Guaranty Title building.
County “space needs” committee members Elton Fay and David Shorr were also dubious about asking voters for the tax increase with so much vacant space in the Roger Wilson building.
Despite these misgivings, county officials bumped up the sales tax to fund more office space and are now draining reserves to purchase more property.
Panned plan
If any plan exists for Boone County’s real estate reserve, it may be the one that Boone County Presiding Commissioner Ken Pearson recently articulated.
“The goal has been to purchase land in what we call the ‘campus area’ for a government center,” Pearson explained.
But similar plans have been resoundingly panned.
Echoing the 8th Street closure for Courthouse Square, integrating so many cross-street buildings could necessitate closing more streets, further isolating downtown Columbia from neighborhoods to the north and impeding traffic, Special Business District Executive Director Carrie Gartner told the Tribune in March 2005.
“A lot of people do master plans without realizing that their plans may inadvertently disrupt the fabric of downtown,” Gartner said of a recent county plan to close 7th Street between Ash and Walnut.
More importantly, though, Boone County has a growing list of needs, a troubled tax base, and a population already stressed by rising costs on nearly every front — from a gallon of gas to a gallon of milk.
Trading liquid cash reserves for nonliquid land reserves at such a time isn’t prudent and may eventually prove a contentious event that echoes the county’s last large real estate venture—the fairgrounds purchase many say cost then-presiding commissioner Don Stamper his job.