Back in March, the Tuscola County Board of Commissioners
decided to rent space from Dost Property.
It took until Thursday for the commissioners to agree to the
lease, and District 5 Commissioner Dan Grimshaw voted against the deal.
The lease gives the county 8,500 square feet in the basement
of the building on North State Street, across from the county courthouse, at a
cost of $3,720 a year, with the option to expand to up to 20,000 square feet of
storage. The lease is good for 10 years, with the option of five additional
10-year renewals. The cost will go up, based on the national consumer price
index.
To end the lease, each party has to provide a 90-day notice.
“If we don’t give a 90-day notice within that time, it
automatically renews for 10 more years,” District 2 Commissioner Thomas
Bardwell said. “It really puts the responsibility on those from the county at
that particular time to remember it is 90 days and when it ends.”
Grimshaw voted against the lease because of that tie to the
CPI and the five 10-year renewals.
“I’m not comfortable with five additional terms of 10
years,” Grimshaw said. “I think we want to put in one 10 years, that’s fine.”
To do five such periods, he said, ties the hands of future commissions.
“You could, by then, be able to store everything on flash
drives,” District 4 Commissioner Doug DuRussel said.
Bardwell said the lease can be renewed for up to five
additional 10-year periods, not that it requires it to be renewed for that
long. “It is not automatic unless you don’t do something before 90 days (before
a 10-year period ends),” he said.
He said the county should leave that in because it gives it
the option to stay the course if economic conditions make that agreement more
favorable for the county.
As for DuRussel’s concerns, Clerk Jodi Fetting said all
court records from 2009 to today have been scanned and are being kept electronically.
That doesn’t mean the paper records can be discarded.
“Legislation has not been changed nor has there been support
to change that legislation to allow for court records to be retained in an only
virtual fashion,” she said. “Currently, right now the legislation I am guided
by is paper only. We still have to have paper.”
Eight years ago, she said, Oakland County tried to push for
electronic-only court records and was unsuccessful. “And we still don’t have
that.”
Any space remaining in the current storage areas, she said,
is going to be taken by district court records because the district court has
run out of space. “I have one and a half shelves left, which will barely get me
through the rest of this year,” she said.
“My need is critical.”
The deal already has been delayed three months, she said,
and it is going to be a big project to move files into the Dost building
basement. “We have to move from two locations into one,” she said, “and that is
just the clerk records. That’s not records for any other entity here. This is a
very large undertaking.”
Signing the lease will allow the county to consolidate
records into one place. It also will make it easier to find records, Fetting
said, because right now they are in any of three or four locations.
“I would really like to get this contract signed today,”
District 1 Commissioner Tom Young said, “and get the wheels in motion and get
the storage going.”
“We have to,” District 3 Commissioner Kim Vaughan said.
The commissioners were concerned a future board might not
remember to review its storage needs when that 90-day period begins before the
end of a 10-year period. Both controller/administrator Clayette Zechmeister and
Fetting said they could set up a way to remind the commissioners of the 90-day
notice period when a lease period draws to an end.
Grimshaw said the landlord also should be required to notify
the tenant when the expiration date and the 90-day notice are approaching.
“I think it would really be a problem if they gave us a
90-day notice,” Young said. “How would we be able to move that stuff?”
“Once you start filling that basement, it is going to be a
herculean effort to move it,” Bardwell said. “Let some other board of
commissioners decide if they want to do that.”
Grimshaw said the property owners – Mark Ransford and Damian
Wasik of Ransford-Wasik LLC – might sell the building at some time to an
outside investor, which could have other plans for the building. Bardwell,
however, said the lease gives the county the first right of refusal, so the county
could choose to buy the building if it ever goes up for sale.
Grimshaw also objected to the use of the U.S. Department of
Labor consumer price index to determine rent changes, saying it is “distorted”
by the larger cities that are part of that national index.
“It is going to be a marginal difference,” Grimshaw said.
Zechmeister said the county lawyers, who reviewed the lease, said the
difference will be so marginal “it would make more sense to keep it the way it
is.”
Buildings and grounds supervisor Mike Miller said the county
would lose one of its current storage buildings if a new jail, as it is planned
now, were to be built. In the meantime, the sheriff could use that building for
his department’s records because he also needs more space. Currently the
sheriff’s office is storing records in the jail basement.
In order to centralize records, the commissioners instructed
Miller and Zechmeister to meet with Sheriff Glen Skrent and Ransford to see if
the sheriff’s records also can be moved into the Dost Building basement.
