Central-office real estate: can you upgrade your headquarters without looking self-serving?

School Administrator, August, 2003 by Priscilla Pardini

Meanwhile, the City of Charleston rents the third floor of the building from the district, a move that brings in $300,000 a year. The city also built a parking garage adjacent to the building that provides the district with 160 parking places free of charge. Says Hartley, "These days, you have to look for creative ways to get these kinds of projects done."

RELATED ARTICLE: Case Study No. I: Harford County, Md.

There's no denying the fact that something has to be done about the state of the administrative office facilities in the Harford County, Md., Public Schools.

"We're renting office space all up and down Main Street in Bel Air," says John Miller, supervisor of purchasing for the district. Space at those sites is designed to supplement office space in the district's 121-year-old administration building, which for years has been expanded with portable trailers. All in all, it's an inefficient and costly way to manage the 40,000-student, 5,000-employee district.

The school board's hand has been forced by rapidly increasing enrollment--the student population stood at 26,000 in 1984--to first build and renovate schools. A new administration building, says Miller, "was never a priority."

But Miller says he's optimistic that officials may have come up with a creative way to generate the capital funds in a "budget neutral" way. The idea is for Harford County to enter into a partnership with a private contractor who would design and build the district a new central-office building. The contractor then would lease the building to the district for 25 years, at which point the district would own the building. Leasing will cost the district no more than the $400,000 a year it now pays to rent space for administrators at six satellite locations.

A total of 17 contractors indicated interest in the project, and five were asked to submit formal proposals to the district. Miller hopes cons tracts can be signed this summer and the new offices opened by 2005. He calls the plan a "politically appealing" way of upgrading administrative space. With the county studying the feasibility of building a new high school and middle school, that's an important consideration.

Case Study No. 2: Orange and Broward Counties, Florida

School officials in two Florida counties, Orange and Broward, came under fire when they moved their district headquarters to glass-enclosed skyscrapers in 1990. In downtown Orlando, Orange County's new $20 million, 221,000-square-foot facility was quickly dubbed the "Ivory Tower." In Fort Lauderdale, Broward County's $23.3 million, 180,000-square-foot former bank building was termed the "Crystal Palace."

Thirteen years later, however, officials in the two districts are facing radically different scenarios when it comes to dealing with their high-profile administrative headquarters.

Thomas J. Calhoun, Broward's former deputy superintendent for facilities and construction management, concedes the building still raises the hackles of some locals. "Every once in a while you hear comments about luxurious quarters," says Calhoun. "We're still paying the price for something we did 10 years ago."