‘The end of their useful lives’ – accountants tell us just how bad City Hall is
While it has long been known that the City Hall is one of the few tall buildings left in San Diego without a sprinkler system, and that it’s ugly and filled with asbestos, it appears the building is also an incredibly inefficient and should be closed within 10 years. A report (PDF) by accounting firm Ernst & Young released yesterday by the Centre City Development Corporation took a hard look at the options for dealing with the city’s workspace and concluded that the do-nothing option may be the worst.
E&Y’s main point seems to be that the city’s use of space is extraordinarily inefficient. Typically, in older buildings, the report says, there are 225 square feet per employee in an office space. In modern buildings, there’s 180 square feet per employee. The city both leases and owns space, and taken together, but ignoring the concourse, which doesn’t have much office space, it allocates 323 square feet per employee, 80 percent more than is common in modern buildings.
But I’m willing to let the report speak for itself.
The report included the following chart outlining the state of the city-owned buildings:
| Building | Year Built | Size (sq. feet) | Employees | Class | Condition |
| City Administration Building (ed: Known to us as City Hall) | 1963 | 188,926 | 600 | C | Poor |
| City operations building | 1965 | 213,905 | 400 | C | Poor |
| Concourse | 1963 | 158,119 | 60 | C | Poor |
… and then it had some choice words describing them:
• “Mechanical and electrical systems are dated and have reached the end of their useful lives.”
• “The design and functional efficiency of the office space has changed since the buildings were originally constructed. On some floors, former janitor’s closets have been converted to lunch rooms with the old mop sink serving as the only water source in the rooms.”
• “The buildings have [asbestos-containing materials], which is one reason sprinklers were only partially installed on a couple of upper floors (but never activated)”
• “Mechanical and roof systems which have significantly exceeded their useful life and are at risk to fail.”
• Regarding the concourse: “The facilities currently receive limited use for events and public meetings and they currently lose money to operate.”
The city also leases a total of 532,762 square feet of office space at 600 B Street, Civic Center Plaza and the Executive Complex. The report says these spaces are typically in “far superior” condition to the city owned buildings. But it also points out that the space was taken on an “as is” basis, meaning the city didn’t make any changes to layout when it took the space. As a result, the report says, “The City of San Diego is located in extremely dated space with inefficient workplace standards and large amounts of unused space used for storage or sitting empty. We were informed of, and witnessed, executive assistants in large window offices on some of the floors and departmental storage in many interior cubes.”
In the report, Ernst & Young found that the proposal by design firm Gerding Edlen (PDF) would probably end up saving the city the most money, though it raised a number of concerns about the assumptions int he original analysis performed by the accounting firm Jones Lang LaSalle. JLL will be running its numbers again taking these considerations into account.
The worst option would be the scenario in which San Diego does nothing to improve its city workspace for the next 30 years. But, they said, the city could save money over the next 10 years staying put, possibly allowing San Diego to weather the financial crisis.
