The Mobile County 911 Board has agreed to purchase the Mobile County Emergency Management Agency’s current headquarters on McGregor Avenue, a move officials say clears a major hurdle in a decade-long effort to replace the aging building with a new Emergency Operations Center.
Board members with the Mobile County Communications District (MCCD), which oversees county 911 operations, approved a resolution during a March 12 meeting pledging to buy the EMA’s McGregor Avenue facility at fair market value once the agency begins construction on a new center near the MCCD’s existing campus on Zeigler Boulevard. No money has changed hands yet, and officials say a closing date has not been set.
The commitment is designed to help the EMA secure funding for a replacement Emergency Operations Center, a facility used to coordinate personnel and resources during hurricanes, severe weather and other emergencies. Portions of the current McGregor Avenue building are more than 60 years old, and its deteriorating condition has fueled county interest in a new facility for nearly ten years. Fiscal constraints have repeatedly delayed the project.
Because state law limits how the MCCD’s board can spend money, purchasing the McGregor Avenue property was identified as the clearest legal path for the district to contribute to the new center. MCCD Attorney Larry Wettermark told board members the district’s governing statutes only allow it to fund emergency communications work in Mobile County, which limits direct financial support for a separate agency like the EMA.
“I was asked to look at it from a legal standpoint, and in my opinion, the only way the board could participate would be if there is a need for the space,” Wettermark said at the March 12 meeting. “Secondly, if there was a joint facility, the board would have to justify the amount of financial contribution to the building with the amount of space or use it would get from the building.”
MCCD Deputy Director Charlie McNichol recently traveled to Louisiana and Mississippi to tour similarly configured joint 911 and emergency management facilities, calling the shared layout “a great concept.” However, he noted those communities had lost their emergency facilities entirely to storms, forcing them to build both a 911 center and an EMA building from scratch — a very different situation from Mobile County’s.
“The difference is, Mobile County 911 doesn’t really need a new facility,” McNichol said.
MCCD Director Gary Tanner agreed the district does not need an entirely new building just a few hundred feet from its current location, but said the MCCD does need additional space for a training facility and its newly created electronics department. Tanner added that the McGregor Avenue building could also serve as a backup site if MCCD staff were ever unable to work from their current facility.
“Our recommendation is that we assist in funding the new structure next door with the value of purchasing that building from the EMA,” Tanner told the board, which then approved the resolution.
The final purchase price will be determined by a future appraisal, though Tanner estimated at the meeting that the McGregor Avenue building is currently worth somewhere between $1.5 million and $2 million. The MCCD has set aside roughly $1.3 million toward the purchase over the past several years but had not formally committed the funding until last week’s vote.
Mobile County Engineer Joe Ruffer, who previously served on both the MCCD and EMA boards, said construction cost estimates remain preliminary. “How much it’s going to cost? You don’t know that until you take bids,” Ruffer said. “At this time, the county is just looking for a resolution saying [the 911 board] would be willing to do this.” While not a binding commitment, the resolution gives the EMA a clearer financial picture as it works to advance the long-delayed project.
Comparable joint facilities McNichol toured in Louisiana and Mississippi cost between $5 million and $15 million to build, though no final budget or funding plan has been set for Mobile County’s new center. The land for the project was donated by the city of Mobile, but a previously pledged $7 million in additional funding from the Mobile City Council has since been withdrawn. Mobile County has committed $7.5 million from its capital improvements fund toward construction, and officials have discussed adding another $2.6 million from the 2012 capital improvements program, though only the $7.5 million is formally in place.
County officials have also applied for funding through the RESTORE Act, which will direct a share of civil penalties paid by BP over the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill toward Gulf Coast recovery projects once a federal court rules on the amount owed. The EMA has already received about $2 million in federal grants for the new Emergency Operations Center, though Mobile County EMA Director Ronnie Adair said roughly $800,000 of that has gone toward designing a structural plan for the building.
Under that design, the new center could cost approximately $14 million and span about 36,000 square feet once complete. Adair said he was encouraged that the MCCD had followed through on its commitment even as the rest of the funding picture remains unresolved.
“Thankfully [the MCCD] approved that over there,” Adair said. “Right now we’re still kind of in limbo waiting to see if the County Commission or city of Mobile might be able to come up with enough revenue to fund the construction.”
Adair singled out Mobile County Commissioners Connie Hudson and Merceria Ludgood as two of the project’s strongest supporters on the commission. Hudson has previously said the project has become more urgent because the $2 million in federal grants awarded to the EMA comes with a spending deadline. The county has already received two extensions on that deadline, she said, and additional extensions are not guaranteed — meaning the federal government could seek repayment if construction requirements aren’t met in time.