Travis County Commissioners Court
January 12, 2010,
Item 4
Number 4 is to receive updates broaddus & associates concerning.
>> good morning, Commissioner, this is only a discussion item today and we were expecting a final approve on January 26th.
we are continuing to work with the elected firms and department heads that are involved to review the document, today is intended to provide you with a summary of the findings of phase one, and to, again, anticipate an approval of January 26th.
I will turn it over to steven colsten and let him begin the presentation.
>> good morning Commissioners, I am joined this morning by rob fisch of richie green and lori from Williamson, hooker, jeffrey.
the agenda discussion for this morning is a quick review of the process that we have been through, an update on the program methodology, and -- and a summary of the program outcomes and then a little bit of discussion that you may have about those and then a quick covering of what our next steps are.
the first thing we wanted to talk about is kind of a reminder on why we are doing this study and what to discuss.
the central campus, the key issue of why this study was initiated to address in kind of the first bullet, the very significant identification of spaced efficiency within the existing central campus in terms of square footage for existing facilities.
another key issue to address as we begin to move forward is being able to ensure the accessibility of the resources of the county to the public and make sure you move forward and develop your facilities items in the future, that you are ensuring that accessibility.
certainly as we met with a lot of the different stakeholders we learned about some of the significant inefficiencies in existing operations, and so one of the objectives of this study is to identify opportunities to enhance those operational efficiencies through adjacencies and configurations of layouts of the spaces to ultimately improve the quality of work environment because we know that has impact on the quality of the deliverable resources to the public.
from a perspective of kind of looking at the real estate within this central campus and I know this is not necessarily a real estate endeavor that we have talking about, but from a highests and best use perspective, as representatives of the constituency and the county and the taxpayers you are taking public owned ass set and making sure from resource perspective that you are using for its highest ability from a government perspective and taking all of those resources that you have and using them in a -- in a fiscally and developmentally -- developmentally appropriate way.
and then certainly the swept of the plan is to inform both your near and your long-term decisions, based on much more of a strategic plan, so that you, as Commissioner's court are very informed about decisions that may take place within the -- and impact your facilities in the central campus and ha you will l have the ability to do that within an informed context, understanding what the long range implications are in those decisions and lastly and certainly not least important to be a good stewart of the taxpayer dollars as it looks at the significant investment, dealing with capital investment and construction.
so the intent overall that we kind of identified back with you in June as we went through the divisioning session with many stakeholders within the county government, was to develop a state of guiding principals and one of the things that we said when we were preparing those guiding principals in the visioning session was that we wanted to be able to go back and kind of almost do self-assessment at different points throughout the project and as we come to the close of the phase one needs assessment phase, we have kind of, you know, are taking a look again at some of those initial guiding principals and warranted to kind of look and see what kind of components of those we have addressed, so highlighted in bold and red, we have -- we have indicated some of those guiding principle sub elements, which have been addressed in the needs assessment, those which still indicated in black will be able to get into as we move forward into the phase two master planning phase, which will be much more -- will start dealing with physical planing of the central campus as well as engage the community in a much broader way but so far, certainly the first item out of the shoot there is ensuring the 25 year space needs will be met and addressing if use of the county resources, in terms of real estate building, finances, et cetera, and then improving the facilities to enhance productivity and the delivery of the county services.
within the context of ensuring the critical adjacencies have been maintained, we spent a long time talking about adjacency matrixes and which offices needed to have priority location next to one another or separated from one another.
as we look at creating campus identity and enhancing access to the campus, a lot of those will be addressed more deliberately in phase two as we get into the physical planning but we have, in the identity perspective, been able to identify quality of the spaces, as we toward a lot soft is existing facilities downtown and written deliberate assessments of those existing facilities and have been able to develop some priorities within the program that will address how those can be improved.
in addition we have provided opportunity for multiprogram spaces that can be a tremendous resource to the county, as well as -- as well as to the community.
in terms of improving campus connectivity, we have integrated accessibility standards within our space program requirements, and our space standards, we have identified separation issues as it relates to security, and then certainly from a technology perspective, we have -- we have been have spent a lot of time looking at the data center technology and infrastructure needs that is tracking a little bit different schedule from some of the rest of the program but we will actually be delivering the -- the drafts based program for the data center the end of this week and so that will be that is certainly addressed within the contest of the guiding principles.
the schedule for the overall needs assessment, red vertical line represents where we are today and if you see the line there under tab for facility requirements, the first blue star represents the meeting today in a discussion section with the Commissioner's court, will be back again, add rodney mentioned on the 26th for a vote, on the final space program projections, and then five -- task five we will be delivering the remaining sections of the draft, of the needs assessment report with the final report delivered in March -- in addition what you won't see or will see at the beginning of the presentation is the beginning of the similar schedule for phase two master plan, this is the schedule for the needs assessment portion.
in terms of the space program methodology, the last time we were before you, we were -- was for your voting session where you approved the staffing projections for general government and for the courts.
and this, where we talked about the current staffing, 2015 staffing and projections to 25 and 2035 and the overall impact on growth and the county, driven very much largely by the demographic anticipated continued growth of the county over which we are have very little control.
this, together with the other building block of space standards becomes the basis for the development of our space program document that quantifies the square footage requirements over these planning horizons of 2015, 2025, and 2035 the space standards were primarily addressing the offices spaces and support spaces and conference rooms, we were asked to review those and make suggestions for revisions as appropriate and in some cases, develop new space standards in the case of the courts, as described below and there were a couple of -- a couple of spaces that we also identified as new.
just to give you an example of these, in a packet you received as backup Commissioner, should provide you with detail, appendixes which walks through the different space con first figurations but essentially if you look at the space on the space to the left, this is a identification of an office space, essay 3b which is identified for manager, professional staff, et cetera, that identified a requirement for 160 square feet and what we have indicated in here is a configuration that is 14 and a half by 11 feet.
what we have done is we've also showed how that same space can be configured in another way as we meat with a lot of the different stakeholders we would learn there were different technology needs and different needs for the number of people that might be meeting in their office and we spent a lot of time working with all of the various groups to have discussionses about what the appropriate configurations of those spaces might be and how they could be accommodated within the space standards.
likewise, the one you see over to the right indicates the same square footage and how the space can be configured to accuse complicate that square footage allocation recognizing as we go through application -- practical application of these spaces that we may be going into existing buildings and new building configurations, sometimes things we won't know until we get more detailed design down the road but could have barriers such as column grids or window base or other things existing, partition walls that might have an impact on those spaces.
likewise, in particular spaces we had conference rooms and meetings the last many months and you had existing standard on your the -- the medium size conference room and there were issues -- we are accommodating meetings upwards of twelve people and we made accommodations that we developed collaboration with county representatives that were more accommodating in terms of the practical application of how you were actually using your conference rooms today and identified the square footage based on number of folks that are sitting at the table.
to accommodate the credenzas, technology and the video equipment and almost every conference room we have is disscreened, video white boards and other furniture and equipment in there.
and if you are having a meeting of 11 people, they might use this conference room but if you have folks above 12 you can use the same space as well and then there are spaces that dealt with with multifunctions spaces and then the planning guides and we discussed it in terms of the -- it could be resources not only to the county or to the community, with and we had visioning work session, I believe that was held over in the capital complex, because of lack of space spa could accommodate the groups that -- the large group of people that were coming together for that session, likewise we have also had several sessionses where we have been in space over the county's space, so if you look at a couple of these multifunction space configurations we have identified spaces that are flexible, could be utilized in a configuration like this, where maybes thes a classroom, learning education environment, configurations like this, where -- where the chairs can be moved around and a lot of different arrangements, flexible wall partitions,s acoustically treated, where they can be broken-down into smaller spaces, so it could be large sessions within the counties, meetings, public gatherings, training sessions, prebid conferences et cetera that can be accommodated as a campus amenity, not necessarily designated to any one particular department.
and there are adjacencies, matrices and separation of spaces, one was acknowledgment that as the county continues to grow and there is a reciprocal impact on the staffing requirements in the central campus that the limit on the physical resources within the downtown real estate area may have an impact on -- the department in the central campus and in those discussions we had deliberately with our subcommittees general government and the committee of the courts we talked about spaces it is there were a particular office or department that were located outside the central office, for example, that there would be a resource that could be available to them, that when they did come down here, let's say scheduled for 10:30 agenda item and the agenda got backlogged and then they were scheduled for 1:00 o'clock or sometime after lunch that they wouldn't have to get in a car, traverse the downtown area and beyond, meet with folks and then come back, there would be a space that would be accommodated within the context of the Commissioner's space for that which you see here, which you can bring executive manager and a couple of key staff could sit down, have space to work, individual could sit down, have access to printer, be able to work, plug in their laptop and even designated spaces like those at the top of this particular hotel and suite side can accommodate private meeting areas, that was the space that was identified as hoteling, to use a little bit of jargon there, I guess.
rob, do you want to talk some about the court configurations?
>> yes.
the -- the space standards as steven mentioned, we built pretty much on existing Travis County space standards for most of the general government functions.
for the court functions, there were no Travis County standards so we had to create them.
we created -- mainly those are in the areas of courtroom and jury deliberation rooms and holding cells, basically the kind of specialized spaces that go along with the courthouse that are not in typical office function, we went through judge deets and judge perkins for civil and criminal respectively to come up for courtrooms, for the criminal courtrooms jussing a jury standard courtroom recognize the district and ccl, they -- we kind of came to the conclusion that the -- those functions need to be what interchangeable so we weren't going to plan on different courtrooms for those judges.
we wanted to have enough flexibility recognizing that ccl judges can hear certain cases that may require a full jury but where they may not have a full jury they may have more spectators because of some kind of court proceeding and then a trial court case where a district judge might have, so the courtrooms are flexible.
they accommodate enough space in the spectators for a full jury panel for most criminal casesessal.
they have 14 person jury boxes and we went up to four litigant tables because it seems that there is often multidefendant trials and more complex cases that require more participants in the well.
so we came up with the -- this standard of 1900 square feet for courtroom, the current are 1700 to 1740 to you perspective so it is a little bit bigger than what you currently have and these, of course, you know, phase two is when we kind of get into what we are going to reuse new and what we are going to reuse and what we are going to build new.
the cjc, I don't think anybody is talking about tearing that down so the courtrooms are what they are for the cjc for the post part but going forward, we are projecting high growth for Travis County including growth in judges, so new courtrooms, that's why we developed the space standard.
the next one is civil jury courtroom, we work with judge deits and have two courtroom sizes, the 1800 square foot and we have a 1400 square foot courtrooms that a nonjury courtroom, so different in civil court, we recognize there is far less jury requirement in civil court and we felt we could be more efficient and not make all of those jury capable courtrooms, so in that case we have two different size courtrooms and I will also mention it is not shown here is one special proceedings courtroom for each criminal and civil.
roughly 2600 square feet.
a bit bigger than the large courtroom, judge perkins and judge deits have a courtroom now, courtroom of 2,000 so the courtrooms are a little bit bigger than what we they have now but to meet modern requirements for handicap accessibility and long trials that require in some cases possibly even 16 jurors we wanted to create large courtrooms that could have that kind of flexibility.
>> I am going to review this one more time quickly, and it really helps you -- also everybody understand what is in this space program, the net square feet is the space between the walls, and in this room it is a space between the walls and we assigned net square footage amount to every space in the space program, for every agency in Travis County that we have studied in the central campus.
the net occupible square feet includes internal departmental circulation, columns, wall thicknesses, basically in the real estate market what you might call tenant space, that is what occupible space represents and I think that is the most important currency everybody should think in terms of space planning is how are we going to accommodate the net ocfeeble space, and the growth space is space outside areas, such a as main public corridors, elevators, stores, mechanical spaces, public rest rooms, janitor closets, all of the stuff required to make a building work, everything within the envelope of the building, that is the gross square foot, everything but.
>> mr. Greer, can you talk some about our building campus amenities which we pulled out some of the specific departmental projections.
>> before we go to that my I ask a couple of quick questions, backtracking on civil.
you said for criminal courts the standard would be 1900, with the 2600 criminal specials proceeding and civil it was 1800 and then alsos a second smaller --
>> yes, a smaller size, nonjury courtroom, first of all.
>> of how many square feet.
>> 1400 square feet.
>> and in discussions with the judges on the civil side, since I am seeing three different sizes, would there still be dedicated courtrooms or -- of how would that be handled.
>> what do you mean dedicated courtrooms.
>> would it be dedicated to specific judges or --
>> that is something that can be decided later.
>> [one moment, please, for change in captioners] test test test test test test test test test test test test
>> so our starting the 31% deficit and when we look at the 25-year projection we get to basically 106% increase in space, basically saying youded need double the space you have now to meet your 25-year projected need.
>> that doesn't indicate, you know, a million square feet of new space.
that represents a combination of existing space or leased space that you may have or required space that would be anticipated in the future.
and we recognize also that the space -- the building blocks we talked about, the staffing projections and the space standards, together formulate the basis for the square footage projections but the staffing projections as you recall from our last discussions are somewhat influenced by different elements within sort of the five-year planning window, but after we get beyond that, as you remember, our discussion about staffing methodologies is driven largely by population, a component over which none of us really have any control.
>> we're not going to take action on this today.
however, when will it be brought to the court for action?
>> on the 26th.
>> on the 26th?
>> yes, sir.
>> okay.
and I heard earlier, I think, that -- I want to make sure of it, that particular day, come back to the court, I want to make sure that all of the departments, elected officials and everybody else that's involved in this process have had adequate enough time to have input in this process, because what I hate to see happen is that after we adopt or approve whatever the court action is going to be, then we'll have someone that comes in later and says, hey, they didn't da, da, da, da.
so I just want to make sure the opportunity for input is thoroughly exhausted when it comes back -- when it does come back.
>> yeah, we have -- belinda and leslie have done an outstanding job of getting the information out and staying on top of getting information back and, in fact, have received quite a bit of feedback since the report has gone out to the departments.
and so we are receiving that input back and we'll stay on top of that to ensure that everyone has been in the loop.
we will be reaching out to your offices as well to answer any questions that you might have in the coming week or weeks in anticipation of the vote on the 26th, and then -- and then bring it back for the court, so we're endeavoring to make sure that everybody has had an opportunity to see it, comment on it and provide feedback as needed.
>> thanks so much for mentioning that, because I was going to refer to the list of all the people who have been involved in the process.
that's great, and so -- and then we'll continue adding more people to the list to make sure everybody is on the same page.
>> absolutely.
>> -- when we finally get to the end.
thanks.
>> we have on -- on the next two slides we have the summary of the cofort space and the summary of the general -- court space and summary of the general space, and to reiterate rodney's point, the draft you have before you today and the detailed backup of all the spaces, this is the third draft of this space program information that we have submitted, have received comment back on, incorporated those comments and resubmitted -- received comments back on -- so this is the third version.
I believe everybody has indicated until the 15th to receive final comments for us again to incorporate into the final draft for your voting session on the -- on the 26th.
>> and as steven mentioned earlier, this is going to wrap up the phase 1.
your final slide indicates kind of a next step which rolls us into phase 2 after the 26th to include an extensive public outreach, physical analysis, scenario development, stacking and blocking, phasing implementation strategies and then cost estimation, which will come as a part of phase 2, and so what we're hopeful for is that as we go forward we'll continue with the process of including all of the players in the discussion involving the public and then rolling out some of the more detailed information going forward.
>> residents who would like to receive a copy of the executive summary or the report in full by hard copy or electronically should just contact us and we'll get a copy to them.
>> yes, sir.
we'll be happy to get a copy to them.
>> okay.
thank you all very much.
>> thank you, judge.
>> take care.
>> by the way, court members who wish for a one-on-one or a two on the group there, I should just let you know that they want to have that meeting?
>> yes, sir, and what we will also do is -- glen and leslie will be reaching out to your offices, to your staff as well, to see if there's any follow-up or if you'd like to schedule some one-on-one's we'll do that and if you've got anything in particular you need answers on feel free to contact my office and we'll.
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Last Modified:
Tuesday, January 12, 2010 6:37 PM
