In the next month or two, Mercer Island City Council will decide if a bond measure will be placed on the Nov. 4 general election ballot to finance a new Public Safety and Maintenance (PSM) Facility.

City Manager Jessi Bon and Mayor Salim Nice discussed the critical need for the facility, preliminary design concepts and more at the Rotary Club of Mercer Island’s meeting on May 20 at the Mercer Island Community and Event Center.

The facility, which is planned to be situated on the current city hall campus at 9611 SE 36th St., will replace the existing Public Works Building and provide a new combined home for the city’s Public Works teams — including the maintenance facilities and the maintenance yard — police department, Emergency Operations Center, IT and GIS team and customer service, according to city documents presented at the meeting.

Bon said the updated cost estimate of the facility presently sits at a bit below $110 million.

“One of the challenges with building this facility is we have essential teams that are operating there right now. So the phasing and how we’re going to stagger that is still being worked out, but we think it will take about two years, maybe two and a half years, to fully construct the whole facility as we’ve presented here,” Bon said.

The site is the former home of the council chambers, the municipal court and the police department, and the Public Works department building sits at the back of the property. City hall is positioned at the front of the campus and has been shuttered since April 17, 2023, after asbestos-contaminated broken tiles were discovered in the boiler room (the asbestos wasn’t airborne, Bon said). Council unanimously voted to direct the permanent closure of the city hall building at its hybrid meeting in October of that year.

Council also unanimously voted to begin planning on the PSM in March of 2024. Bon noted that both the city council and Public Works buildings are old, have major structural issues and are due for replacement.

“We had already started our planning work to replace both (city hall) and the Public Works Building. But we made the decision at that time, just based on the cost, to shut the (city hall) building down. As you can imagine, highly disruptive, but the best decision for us at the time,” said Bon, adding that safety and security are top priorities of the PSM, which will serve the city for the next 70 to 100 years.

According to a previous Reporter story, one city hall re-occupation scenario had experts disclosing a preliminary cost estimate of $10.2 million for removal and replacement of equipment and materials and finishes.

Answering a meeting attendee’s question, Nice said the city doesn’t yet know exactly how much the construction of the facility will raise the taxes for a typical household.

“We’ve done a tremendous amount of value engineering as we’ve looked at this project. There’s been a lot of needs assessments, needs meetings with staff, consultants and engineers,” Nice said. “Where can we cut costs? And we’ve really trimmed by moving the building, by optimizing the site layout. Countless amounts of dollars have been trimmed out of the project to do that.”

City documents state that council will evaluate a potential bond measure to fund the PSM construction during its June and July meetings.