QUILCENE — The Jefferson County Food Bank Association has hired Silverdale-based consultant firm Barker Creek to manage the completion of the Quilcene Food Bank after the project came to a halt in April.
The firm is pursuing design-build project bids for the organization, said JCFBA Executive Director Patricia Hennessy, who said the building will be completed.
“We’re not walking away from this project,” she said. “We’ve hit the pause button so that we can regroup.”
Hennessy said previous board members’ decisions were not sufficiently grounded in plans.
Hennessy, who was hired in November 2023, said she is the organization’s first executive director in its 37-year history.
As she familiarized herself with the project, she said she discovered it lacked a budget and a capital project fund. Its funding was being pulled directly from the organization’s general operations fund, she said.
Hennessy said that, during COVID, the food bank had an influx of revenue, which may have been what emboldened previous leaders to move ahead with the project.
The Quilcene Food Bank is the largest expenditure in the organization’s history, Hennessy said.
With planning initiated in 2019 and ground broken at the end of 2023, the project was expected to be completed at the end of 2024.
Hennessy said the groundbreaking happened a week after she was hired.
“Part of my job and the expectation of the board is to have someone in my role ask questions,” Hennessy said. “To understand, ‘What is the full scope? What is the breadth? What do operations look like? What are the financials? What are the projects? What are significant expenditures?’
“I started asking questions very early on about the campaign. What I quickly realized was this was really not a capital campaign.”
Hennessy said she didn’t find that there had been any real strategizing or planning.
Early in 2024, several board members’ terms expired. Upon installation, new board members also began noticing that the plans were not sufficient for the scope of the project, according to a food bank press release.
In April, the board voted to halt the process of building the Quilcene Food Bank and to have a full forensic audit performed by Insightful Analytics.
The audit was set to look at financial records from at least as far back as 2020, as well as board and committee meetings with discussions pertinent to the Quilcene project.
Hennessy said early audit findings led to a recommendation to hire an outside agency to manage the completion of the project.
Further, auditors have found a lack of critical oversight in determining true costs of construction and materials, as well as a lack of serious governance protocols for billing, the press release said.
Costs for the project have expanded from an initial figure of $250,000 to over $1 million, according to the press release.
The organization already has put $675,000 into the building, which is probably only 15 percent complete, Hennessy said.
Located at 161 Herbert St., the new building has been framed, the roof and walls are sheathed and windows are in, Hennessy said, but the shell of a building has yet to be winterized.
“It’s a lot to take in,” Hennessy said. “I was hired in November and by the time we got to April 1st, we had a new president, a new vice president, a new treasurer, a new bookkeeper and a new executive director. That’s a lot of change. We feel really great that we have the audit underway.
“I’m not gonna lie, it’s a lot to think about,” she said. “But we’re not looking at the glass as half or three-quarters empty, we’re looking at, ‘Wow, we have an opportunity here to really fill this glass up and do it right.”
‘Opportunity’
While less than ideal, the pause on the project is allowing the organization to look critically at what it can do for the community, Hennessy said.
“Here’s the opportunity: Instead of saying, ‘This is terrible; they shut the project down.’ How can we make this into something amazing?” Hennessy said. “Could we work with local growers and give them freezing and holding space? Could we make it more like a marketplace? We have an opportunity to go back to the county and the planning commission and look at our conditional use permit. There’s property surrounding the building that maybe could be purchased to make us both adjoining and adjacent to the Quilcene skate park and the community center.”
“This is an opportunity that’s on the table,” she said. “This is what I want the community to see, not that a bunch of people shut down this project; we hit the pause button. This is the moment in time when we can do this.”
Hennessy said issues with the project have not affected the organization’s weekly operations.
The Quilcene Food Bank is currently operating out of the Quilcene Community Center, open from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Wednesdays. The community center is managed by Olympic Community Action Programs (OlyCAP) in contract with Jefferson County.
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@sequimgazette.com.
