I know just what you're going to say.
Who cares?
A few million bucks is a drop of ink in the Golden State's Red Sea.
Only a provincial rube gets bent out of shape over the possible blowing of such a picayune amount of public money.
At the risk of sounding like North County's answer to Poor Richard, a million saved is a million earned.
Or to echo the dearly departed Illinois skinflint Sen. Everett Dirksen, a million here and a million there and pretty soon you're talking about real money.
Moreover, if it's just as easy – in fact, arguably easier – to spare the extra expense, wouldn't any public servant take the cheaper course?
Let's start at the beginning.
The California Highway Patrol station in Oceanside is a tired, 41-year-old fossil.
At 11,600 square feet, it's too cramped for the 103 employees who work there. The location, maybe a 2-iron from Goat Hill, Oceanside's public golf course, is fine, but the station itself is ready for retirement.
Those are the obvious facts that suggest an obvious solution:
Move out of the old station, sell or lease the property on Oceanside Boulevard as state surplus, and acquire a suitable building roughly twice its size.
For more than a year, the CHP and the Department of General Services, the state's real estate agency, have been scouting locations in North County, reportedly zeroing in on several acres on La Tortuga Road in Vista, a 9-iron from the Vista Courthouse.
The authorized cost of the new station, which would take two or three years to plan and build: $24 million.
Now it just so happens that a 2-acre parcel adjacent to the prospective CHP site boasts a new, 24,000-square-foot commercial building that's . . . empty.
Yes, empty. Not one tenant has moved in.
The Hacienda building, completed in April, was an unlucky victim of the regional real estate slowdown, said developer Marc Perlman, president of the Marker Co.
Facing a weak market of attorneys and/or doctors seeking office space, Perlman came up with a slick way to turn a temporary lemon into sweet lemonade for taxpayers.
Sell the Hacienda building to the CHP. Why build from scratch when you can buy in a buyer's market?
To avoid an apples-and-oranges problem, Perlman promised to retrofit his building to suit the CHP's unique needs – raising window heights for security, car-servicing areas, enhanced seismic standards, and so on.
When the work was done, he would give the Hacienda's keys to the CHP for $18 million.
In the summer, Perlman submitted detailed retrofit proposals to the Department of General Services. To make the deal work financially, he offered to lease with an option to buy.
From the beginning, however, Perlman felt as if his honest offer was being suffered as an annoyance, not honestly considered.
Perlman, it should be noted, has a few allies in high places who had rattled the CHP's cage on his behalf.
In a June letter, state Sen. Mark Wyland, R-Vista, demanded answers from the CHP and the Department of General Services: “Considering the fact that Governor Schwarzenegger declared a fiscal emergency last December, I would like to understand why the Hacienda building would not only be a viable alternative but also provide an enormous savings to California taxpayers.”
I guess Wyland is as quaintly old-fashioned as I am.
He thinks $10 million – the savings Wyland predicted – is worth not spending if you don't have to.
By the time he contacted me, Perlman had been waiting several months for a response to his latest proposal revision. He had begun to formulate a working theory that the bureaucrats would rather avoid an unsettling change of course than save money.
Yesterday afternoon, the ax finally fell in the form of a faxed rejection letter.
Doug Button, General Services deputy director, offered three objections: Perlman's building cannot “be modified to meeting CHP's security and program needs,” a point Perlman said he never once heard during numerous meetings; Perlman's building would cost the state $3 million to $13 million more, an estimate the Solana Beach developer dismisses as an absurd reversal of reality; and finally, the lease/purchase option would require new funding authority, which could cause delay and uncertainty.
“They're stacking the deck,” Perlman told me. “When have you seen federal, state or local government do anything cheaper than private enterprise?”
I asked him if he intended to keep lobbying Wyland and others to apply pressure on the CHP.
“I will pursue doing what's right,” he promised.
Someday, officials will gather to preen as the ribbon is cut on a new North County CHP station.
Let's not forget to check the bill.
Logan Jenkins: (760) 737-7555; logan.jenkins@uniontrib.com.
