Pinellas government takes another step toward move out of Clearwater

For years, Pinellas County officials have pondered whether the county’s government should move out of its outdated campus in downtown Clearwater. As of last week, that possibility is closer to fruition than ever.

On Thursday, county commissioners gave staff the go-ahead to pursue the next phases of a possible move to consolidated offices somewhere in central Pinellas.

Though the county is still in the preliminary phases of exploring a move, if it does decide to pull up stakes, the decision could be a transformative one. It would mark a new chapter for the county government, which has operated from Clearwater, the county seat, for more than a century. And it would open up real estate that could be crucial in redeveloping downtown.

The approval from commissioners last week — a consensus decision during Thursday’s work session — was based on a report by real estate consulting firm CBRE. It allows county staff to settle on a suitable site, do more detailed designing of new facilities and pin down costs and a timeline.

Any final decision on the move and how to fund it — the cost of a new headquarters is estimated to be between $263 million and $334 million — would need further approval by the commission.

Commissioners said exploring a move was logical and necessary, given the state of the county’s buildings. Much of its downtown campus dates to the the 1970s, and its central building, the Pinellas County Courthouse at 315 Court St., was built in the early 1960s. The maintenance needed to repair and renovate those buildings would cost the county $146 million, according to the CBRE report. Commissioner Dave Eggers described the buildings as “functionally obsolete.”

“Regardless of what you do to try to renovate, to bring things up to current code or standards, you put diamonds on a pig, it’s still a pig,” said commission chairperson Janet Long, who noted that previous discussions on this topic in her 11 years on the commission had stalled out. “How long do you want to kick this can down the road before we finally realize something needs to change?”

A move could allow the county to shrink its footprint from more than 568,000 square feet across more than a dozen buildings to about 317,000 square feet in three buildings, according to the CBRE report. Right now, the county spends about $4 million a year maintaining buildings, Assistant County Administrator Kevin Knutson said Thursday. Downsizing would cut that number in half.

Commissioners still need more information before they’re sold on a move, they said. For one, they need a suitable site. Ideally, that would be somewhere near U.S. 19 and Ulmerton Road, which consultants pegged as the county’s population center and which would make county services more accessible to residents. Knutson said the consultants behind the report couldn’t find any existing, usable buildings larger than 150,000 square feet, meaning that if the county wants to move forward, it will likely have to buy land and build on its own.

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The acreage of potential sites could also have a lot to do with the final cost: Knutson said the estimates were driven up by the assumption that a new county headquarters would need a parking garage, which costs about $30,000 a space. If the county buys something with enough land for ample surface parking, though, that cost could come down.

“I’ve been in favor of exploring this for 10 years,” Commissioner Charlie Justice said. “As long as we can make the dollars work.”