PORT ANGELES — Eagles club members are expected to meet by Wednesday to consider the Border Patrol’s second offer to buy the club’s lodge building for a new North Olympic Peninsula headquarters.
Realtor Pili Meyer, representing Eagles Aerie 483 at 110 S. Penn St., which is two miles west of downtown Port Angeles, said Thursday she expects to meet with the club’s real estate committee by Wednesday “at the latest.”
The club voted Sept. 24 to sell the building to the Border Patrol after the agency made an offer of $1.7 million for the lodge and the 4 acres it sits on.
The Eagles made a counter offer, and the Border Patrol came back with another offer that Meyer received Tuesday night, she said. She declined to state the amount of the offers.
The building and property are valued at $1.8 million, according to the Clallam County Assessor’s Office.
“This is a standard negotiation going back and forth,” said Meyer, with Coldwell Banker Uptown Realty in Port Angeles.
Fine tuning
“There is a lot of fine tuning that has to go on,” Meyer said.
“Nothing is happening quickly in real estate today. This is like watching the earth’s crust form.”
Kevin Wheeler, a member of the Eagles club real estate committee, said Tuesday that “the whole thing is still in process.”
Realtor Karen Kilgore of Windermere Sequim-East, representing the Border Patrol, did not return calls for comment.
The Border Patrol and its companion Homeland Security agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, are moving from the Richard B. Anderson Federal Building in downtown Port Angeles to larger quarters, but the two staffs will not be housed side-by-side as they are now.
ICE looking for space
ICE is looking for leased space, though still in downtown Port Angeles, General Services Administration spokesman Ross Buffington said.
The GSA is coordinating ICE’s move, while the Army Corps of Engineers is coordinating the Border Patrol project.
“Our schedule has us moving ICE into new space in fall of 2011,” Buffington said Wednesday after GSA officials met for an update on relocation.
GSA is releasing information this week on the website, www.fbo.gov, to seek “expressions of interest” from land owners interested in providing leased space, Buffington said.
Potential landlords can get “solicitations for offers” packages by going to the website once the information is posted.
GSA wants 4,000 square feet of office space, Buffington said.”
“The idea is to find out what’s on the market in terms of space,” he said.
“Four-thousand square feet is not a very big requirement. I would think the market exists to be able to accommodate that in an existing building.”
A lease won’t be awarded until “after the first of the year,” Buffington said.
ICE is looking for space with five parking slots.
Room for 50
The Border Patrol is looking for a facility large enough to house a staff of 50.
The Border Patrol expanded from a staff of four in 2006 to 25 by August.
Border Patrol officials have said they are required to seek a 50-person capacity for the project.
Border Patrol critics have protested the expansion of agency activities on the North Olympic Peninsula, such as boarding buses to check passengers for documentation of citizenship.
Though city Planning Director Nathan West said in August that the new facility would be an allowed use at the Eagles site as now proposed, Stop the Checkpoints coordinator Lois Danks said she will continue to protest the move.
“It doesn’t seem like a wise use of taxpayer money,” she said Tuesday.
“If they only need a building for 24 or 25 officers, they should be able to do that size building and save the money.”
Eagles club members have said their membership numbers are too low to support maintenance of such a large building.
“I’ve always felt that if we didn’t sell that, the Eagles may have just ended up not existing in Port Angeles anymore,” Wheeler said.
“It’s a great big building and it has lots of potential, and we weren’t taking advantage of it. The group agreed to proceed ahead, so that’s what we are doing.”
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Senior Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-417-3536 or at paul.gottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
