Klickitat County unveils service building

Klickitat County Commissioner Dave Sauter was busy providing tours for staff and citizens alike last Tuesday. He said the building will benefit citizens by making it easier for them to locate and access county services.

“It’s a one-stop shop,” Sauter said. “Our previous alignment that we had … if anybody came to Goldendale to do business, they kind of had to get routed all over town, and it was not very user-friendly.”

The building will add square footage to existing offices, “although we were pretty conservative with that, just because we didn’t want to build some giant building that was half empty,” Sauter said.

The building has been in use at least since the new year and contains offices for various county departments. The open house event marks the culmination of the first phase of construction, but there is more work to do.

The project calls for the demolition of two former annex buildings and the removal of a manufactured office building. In their places will be public parking lots by the end of construction, scheduled for spring of 2023.

The building was constructed over former parking spots, so the addition of new lots will not only help to replace the spots that were torn out but will also increase the stock of parking spots in town.

“When folks are doing county business, you know that they’re not using parking spaces that the businesses are relying on,” Sauter said.

Sauter acknowledged that the parking scheme was met with hesitancy by the Goldendale City Council, who has yet to approve the plan, which calls for turning Grant Street into a dead-end street and vacating it to the county.

Nothing is set in stone, Sauter said about the parking scheme. But he’s supportive of the original plan.

“We went through a pretty extensive process, developing the plan, working with traffic engineers, public works, and everybody,” Sauter said. “I would rather stay the course. But … there’s 10 right ways of doing something.”

The final construction costs for this phase came just under budget, with the remainder set aside for any contingencies. At one point, contractors raised concerns over potential soil contamination from oil tanks buried in the ground (a gas station had sat on the site years ago). Sauter said potential costs for mitigating the hazard were earmarked in the capital budget.

Sauter said one annex building has yet to be planned for — Annex 5, the old Public Works building. “It’s been the most well-maintained and had a pretty big remodel,” Sauter said. The county is planning to keep it but has not yet figured out what exactly to do with it.

“Potentially it could be used for some other community purpose. It could be used as a daycare center,” Sauter said. “We’re actually using it this summer. The juvenile probation program has temporarily moved into that because theirs is one of the buildings that’s getting (demolished).”

The program will move into the courthouse once the process has finished.

The building marks the first substantial county building in town constructed in the last 80 years, according to contractors DCI Engineers.

“Our team came up with a hybrid structural framing system incorporating glulam columns, cross laminated timber beams, and light framed steel shear walls. To reduce building mass, we designed floor assemblies without a concrete topping slab. Our close collaboration with the architects resulted in a floor system design that met vibration performance similar to a concrete slab,” DCI Engineers said.