The Macon County Board of Commissioners agreed to grant Southwestern Community College a 25-year lease for the National Guard Armory Building after an extensive debate at the board’s Nov. 10 meeting.
The armory building is located in the Macon County Industrial Park, near SCC’s Jerry Sutton Public Safety Training Center.
Board members were divided over the lease agreement. Commissioner Ronnie Beale said the building was worth too much to the county to give the college sole domain over it for the foreseeable future.
“That’s a $2.9 million asset to the people of Macon County that we’d be giving as a gift,” Beale said. “The people of Macon County need that building.”
Other commissioners thought there was no better use for the facility. Commissioner Karl Gillespie felt confident in the planning that had already been done and said that using the facility to maximize emergency service education would be a great social and economic benefit to the county.
“I think it’s the right thing to do for the university, and I think it’s the right thing to do for the citizens of Macon County,” Gillespie said.
Site of new burn building
SCC has been seeking to construct a new burn building used to train firefighters for the past four years. Over that period, the project has gone through several different proposals as the space and funding available have varied. The proposal discussed at the commissioners meeting on Nov. 10 would cost an estimated $2,712,605, of which $1,312,605 would come from the county appropriation, and would be located in the Macon County Industrial Park.
The proposal also involved leasing the National Guard Armory building to the college as classroom space in order to recoup some of the funding used in the construction. County manager Derek Roland said the change in location would be an asset because of more construction-ready land in the area that would help reduce costs.
Roland felt that it was a comfortable arrangement for the county and one they had been waiting to complete for long enough.
“We’ve been discussing this project for quite some time now, and I know that the college, as well as the board of commissioners, is eager to see this project move forward,” Roland said.
The current burn building was deemed structurally deficient and unsafe in 2017.
In February 2019, the original budget for the relocation project called for the new facility to be built on Siler Road, but cost overruns brought that plan to a halt. The original budget of $2.71 million had ballooned to over $4 million after the college received cost estimates.
The commissioners approved a motion to allow Roland to begin negotiating with Southwestern Community College for a 25-year lease on the National Guard Armory property by a margin of 3-2, with Beale and commissioner Gary Shields voting against.