Probably sensing that Ukiah wasn’t exactly a hotbed of investment opportunities in 2017, the Bank of America closed their big downtown branch office.
BofA then placed their form-does-definitely-not-follow function of an eyesore of a building on the market for about $1.5 million.
Nobody wanted it, mainly because it was over-large and nonsensical for banking, much less desirable for a downtown retail business.
So in 2019 the City of Ukiah made a low-ball offer of about $750k and BofA snapped up that offer. Ukiah city staff claimed in 2019 that they could use the building for additional office space as the city was feeling a bit cramped at their cush main offices on the Westside.
Six years passed, and the building sat vacant, so we can safely conclude that there wasn’t really much need for additional office space.
Then last year, as Ukiah started ramping up for expansion, including their grandiose plans to annex most of the Ukiah Valley, terrifying the property owners who would be absorbed, Ukiah saw an opportunity to move some of their staff (mainly the City’s expanding water bureaucracy) into the old BofA building.
As usual, grandiosity was the City’s plan.They hired an architect to completely reconfigure the cavernous old bank offices into a two-story office building (aka “annex”), complete with a costly new elevator to meet ADA requirements.
Then earlier this year they went out for bids for the remodel project and ended up with only two qualified bidders: Cupples Construction, a long-time, well-regarded Ukiah area contractor with an excellent reputation and track record for getter ‘er done on time and on budget; and a Santa Rosa outfit called DMR construction.
DMR’s bid for the large remodeling project came in at about $3.5 million, roughly $300k less than local guy Cupples bid of around $3.8 million. Despite Cupples being local and well-regarded, the City of Ukiah, which apparently doesn’t have a buy-local policy with a 5%-10% preference discount, gave the job to DMR.
Remember, this was a building that had an estimated value of $1.5 million in 2018, and Ukiah now plans to “remodel” it for an estimated $3.5 million — assuming there are no overruns or add-ons, which there will be.
When Ukiah presented their grand annexation proposal earlier this year, the town’s widely derided leadership claimed that Ukiah’s planning bureaucracy was much more efficient than the County’s and, therefore, supposedly, Ukiah could do a better job of new development if they annexed the proposed 2500 additional County parcels. That expansion proposal, unanimously howled down by the people to be annexed is now in permanent limbo, waiting for the County to re-evaluate the present city-county tax sharing agreement and for Ukiah to re-evaluate how much they want to grab.)
But if the BofA remodel/annex job is an example of Ukiah’s ability to accomplish things, with its six years in planning and financing along with the loss of assessed value and taxes with the departure of the bank and government acquisition of the property, we don’t see where Ukiah is in any position to claim the high ground in the planning bureaucracy and efficiency department. But they certainly are better than the County at growing themselves and shafting local contractors.
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