The Macon County Board of Commissioners voted to move forward with plans to grant Southwestern Community College a 25-year lease on the National Guard Armory building.
During the November meeting of the board, the commissioners voted by a 3-2 margin to allow county manager Derek Roland to negotiate the lease with SCC. At the December meeting, commissioners Ronnie Beale and Gary Shields voiced their reservations about the proposal once again.
Shields suggested that the matter be put on hold until the summer so that everyone would have time to think about the county’s latest space needs analysis and how giving away the property for the next 25 years would impact the county’s long-term financial state, including commissioner Josh Young, who began his term after the previous vote.
“My motion would be to delay this moving forward with discussions on leasing the National Guard armory to July 1, 2021 so we can evaluate,” Shields said. “This delay, too, would allow our new board member, Mr. Young, and the interim county attorney to acclimate better.”
Beale said it’s too hasty to give the community college unfettered access to the $2.9 million property, especially since the county will need to invest about $1.2 million in a new roof, a new heating system, more women’s restrooms and several other renovations before the building is suitable for students. He also took issue with how little research had been done on other options for the space and felt that Macon County citizens might not get the most out of leasing the space to the SCC public safety training program, where Macon residents make up about 20 percent of students.
“This motion came literally pretty much out of nowhere with no information whatsoever,” Beale said. “We want to give SCC a training facility, but when you have an asset that belongs to the Macon County people. … It’s on the Macon County taxpayers. It’s on their shoulders to pay for this.”
However, the other commissioners remained committed to the original plan. While selling the building for a profit could eventually be an option, several of them worried about the facility falling into disuse. Commissioner Jim Tate argued that the commissioners had been looking for other options for the space for nearly a decade and that SCC’s use of it would be more valuable to Macon County than letting it sit empty any longer.
“We’ve been discussing it the whole nine years I’ve been a commissioner and we’ve made absolutely zero progress,” Tate said. “I personally can’t come up with a better alternative for it.”
Voicing the deciding opinion in his first night with the board, Young said that the benefits SCC offers both local students and law enforcement make a lease a strong investment in the future of Macon County.
“Southwestern is a huge asset to our county,” Young said. “It could be a great move for our future.”
The commissioners voted against waiting until July to discuss a lease by a margin of 3-2 with Shields and Beale voting for it.
Tyler Goode, director of public relations at SCC, said that if all goes as hoped for, the building will be used as classroom space for basic law enforcement training, park services, fire and rescue services and more programs as necessary. The school’s Public Safety Training Center can serve more than a thousand students per year.
“For the 2018-19 academic year, the most recent year for which we have this data available, 1,228 students were served through our Public Safety Training Center,” Goode said.
“For many years, our growing PSTC has needed to use portable buildings to accommodate the region’s training needs. This addition of the armory is a tremendous help in relieving some of that overcrowding,” he said.