Thursday, April 07, 2005

Healthy Digs

Health Department seeks new home.

The City and County Public Health Department is looking for a new home. Some place bigger. Some place newer. Some place they can grow into. And this is both normal and natural.

On the other hand, they are a government entity and, from past experience, when I wore a green suit 24/7, you can’t always get what you want. [Note: I remember working out of a rat-infested, abandoned boxcar for a while, at one point. And I was grateful for even that.]

But the people in that department are doing a good effort at expressing their desires to the public. And a pretty good job of examining their options, as far as I can tell.

They’ve got seven sites identified:

[A] Santa Fe, on the east side, just a tad south of 1st avenue.
[B] An “Off Building” of the Mid-Town Center area. Right next to 4th avenue.
[C] South Main Street, near D street. [Note: The star on the MapQuest map looked like it was on Union and B street, across from Holmes Hardware.]
[D] South Union Avenue(?) The location seemed a bit confused as the MapQuest and eye-in-the-sky elements depicted the location as being Central Main and Grand.
[E] Central Pueblo Center, between 4th and 6th, West and the Midtown Center. Looks like my computer shop may have to find new quarters.
[F] The Olde Holmes Hardware store at Union and B street.
[G] The old Sears store in Mid-Town Center.

Each of these options have their respective advantages and disadvantages. But that is always the case. The challenge is to balance all of those, not only as perceived by the Public Health Department, but also by the city, the county, and the citizens therein. Futhermore, they need to be aware of the impact, not only for themselves but upon the area they land in.

Case in point….if they were to occupy the old Holmes Hardware (site F), the advantage is they’d get a great old building for themselves. The disadvantage to the city of Pueblo would be that it would eliminate a great old building that could be used by an anchor store to bring commercial business into the Union Historic District. That would put a big kabosh on enhancing the city tax base by having, say….a Borders book store in their instead.

Then there is the situation with site A; Santa Fe near 1st. A big open area with some big old buildings on it. According to the plan, they would raze those buildings and put in something else. However, those old buildings could serve well for new offices, with renovation. And I suspect that renovation would cost less than demolition, hauling away, prepping the ground and new construction. Unless those buildings are about to fall down, and from seeing them last they didn’t look quite that bad, why throw away tax-payers money?

Site B, on 4th Street, in the vicinity of Mid-Town Center has promise, but there is no building there. Something new would have to be built.

Site C, on Main Street, has the same situation as Site B; having to build new.

Site D, on South Union(?)/actually Central Main, is the same as sites B and C; having to build new.

Site E, in the large building east of Mid-Town, has an existing building and good parking. I’ll have to figure out where MaxTech moves too, or maybe they can provide IT support to the department and co-exist there?

Site G, the vacant Sears building has a sitaution similar to the old Holmes Hardware. Where we need commercial enterprise, it’s something of a self-inflicted wound to move a government agency into such a facility.

Personally, I favor site A. A little paint. Some suspended ceiling with cable tracks and air conditioning/heating above it a bit of dry wall and paint and the place would look like new, on the inside. On the outside, the building could well last into the NEXT century….but I’d like a good engineer to be certain of that. And the money saved could be used to put in that in-door gymnasium one young employee of the department was hankering to have.