BY THE NUMBERS
Previous Butler County savings on lease agreements:
South West Ohio Regional Training Center: $49,750
WorkForce One: $8,381
Records Center: $2,250
Family Connections: $10,600
Law Library: $70,000
Children Services: $60,000
Job and Family Services: $56,000
Property Room: $20,000
Total: $278,837
Source: Butler County
A $60,000 annual rent payment, or $5,000 a month, for 3,800 square feet of warehouse space seems a bit steep to Butler County Coroner Dr. Lisa Mannix, so she’s shopping for a new home for the county morgue.
Her department is just one of several that is looking to save taxpayer money by negotiating down rent costs or doing away with some leased space. Other Butler County departments have saved taxpayers $278,837 since 2012 by doing the same.
Mannix said she was able to renegotiate the morgue lease from $17 per square foot — $64,400 annually — to $14 in 2013, but she thinks the space should only be priced at $8 to $12 per square foot. Finding adequate morgue space, however, can be tricky because special equipment — like operating room lights, an in-floor scale, a refrigerator, a sally port and flooring that can tolerate spills — is needed.
“It’s a matter of finding space that is going to work for us and is cost effective,” she said. “It’s got to make sense cost-wise, to move or to stay here to have it a good rate, a reasonable rate. I think $60,000 is high for this space.”
County commissioners recently gave Mannix approval to seek space that could house both the morgue and the coroner’s administrative offices. The morgue is now located on Fairgrove Avenue in Hamilton and the coroner’s administrative offices are on the sixth floor of the Government Services Center —about a mile and a half away.
The morgue lease is up in February, and Mannix said she has been looking for new space almost since she was appointed and then elected in 2012.
Children Services is also looking at savings soon when their lease ends on the Family Connections visiting center on Brookwood Avenue in Hamilton. The agency estimates it will save $800,000 a year by contracting visiting services to Childrens Diagnostic Center. The county laid off 13 union workers and recently settled an unfair labor practices complaint by agreeing to pay those workers a total of $120,000.
Director Bill Morrison said the visiting program will be moved to 2100 Pleasant Ave. this summer in newly renovated space owned by CDC. Terms of the contract are still being worked out, but what used to be a $1.2 million cost will be reduced to less than $300,000, according to Morrison. The new center will have age appropriate rooms and activities
“The rooms will have activities for each age group, so it’s designed to be more like what virtually all other counties use for a visitation center, that accent the parent-child interaction,” Morrison said. “Rather than accenting chasing children around a big open center.”
The county commissioned a space study about four years ago to evaluate all of the county-owned and -leased office space. The upshot was that 25 percent to 40 percent of the space is unused or underutilized. With the loss of about 500 employees during the recession, much of the seventh, eighth and ninth floors of the Government Services Center is now wide open space piled high with unneeded office equipment.
A couple years ago there was some talk about relocating the auditor, recorder and treasurer all under one roof because people often need all three of their services at once. Treasurer Nancy Nix is housed in the Government Services Center while the other two offices are in the annex building a few blocks down on High Street.
County Administrator Charlie Young said they targeted the “low hanging fruit” several years ago with the space consolidations and renegotiated leases, but they haven’t made any big moves since. He said it would make sense to move the auditor and recorder to the Government Services Center and perhaps use their current location as a one-stop-shop for human services.
“We have looked at those types of moves, the difficulty that we’re facing is it’s very expensive,” he said. “To really do a whole scale realignment would cost millions of dollars … When you are making changes of that magnitude, the cost to revamp the spaces, what we’re struggling with now is to make sure if we make that investment, that the return to the taxpayers will be worth the cost.”
The county is working on possibly locating a kiosk or small office on the first floor of the Government Services Center where people could pick up forms and drop off information for the Child Support Enforcement Agency and Job and Family Services.
“The purpose of that is to save wear and tear on the building,” Young said. “But much more importantly, it would be to better serve our citizens so they don’t have to spend that extra time and effort getting up and down in the building.”
A few years ago the county was paying $15,750 to rent space for housing county records. Randy Quisenberry, the county’s asset and purchasing director, said plans to move the records to the former jail or the Historic Courthouse didn’t pan out, but records keeper Rhonda Freeze is working on reducing the number of physical files.
“What she’s really trying to do is eliminate all those records, through imaging, electronic copies and finding out what has met its retention schedule,” he said. “She has been meeting with the office holders to determine what they need to keep and what they are able to dispose of. She’s trying to really reduce that footprint. The smaller the footprint obviously the more options we have for relocating.”
Commissioner Don Dixon said it may seem as if nothing much has been happening on the space re-utilization front but that’s not so.
“There hasn’t been any physical movement, but there has been a lot of discussion and there’s been a lot of different ideas pencilled down and (we’ve) looked at what-ifs,” he said. “I believe we’ll be making some of those moves here probably in the next 12 months.”
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