Tompkins County project team seeks SHPO signoff to deconstruct three downtown buildings, advance consolidated government campus

Holt Architects presented the design team’s schedule and preservation strategy for a proposed Tompkins County center of government in downtown Ithaca, saying the next formal milestone is submitting documentation to the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) and hosting a SHPO site visit in April.

Quay Thompson, principal architect at Holt Architects, told the committee the project team sees three primary goals: “to consolidate government services to a single campus,” to “improve the quality of work space for county government employees,” and to “reduce the long term cost of government services by getting out of existing leases and consolidating departments into a single flexible office building.”

The architectural team summarized the options analysis the submission will present to SHPO: (1) retain all three existing buildings on the site (deemed infeasible chiefly because of parking and cost), (2) retain some buildings while adapting others (more costly and still problematic), or (3) deconstruct the three buildings and build a new, salvaging and reusing materials where practical. Thompson said the submission will include background, due-diligence options, and a comparative summary of findings to explain why the team is requesting permission to remove the three buildings.

Why this matters: SHPO approval is a critical path item. Thompson said the team expects a draft SHPO submission around March 10, a final submission around March 20, and a SHPO on-site tour scheduled for April 10; the team intends to start schematic design May 12 if SHPO engagement does not require additional follow-up. Those dates drive the project schedule the county and consultants are using to budget design, construction start (target January 2027), construction completion (end of 2028), and renovation and move-in windows (the team is targeting February–July 2029 for renovation completion).

During discussion, committee members and staff explored the implications of three main topics that the SHPO submission must address: historic-preservation tradeoffs, parking and access, and logistics for relocating departments during deconstruction and construction.

Historic-preservation tradeoffs and reuse: Thompson said the project team is working with preservation consultants, including Elise Johnson Schmidt, the team’s historic preservation architect, and expects to incorporate results from academic studies of reuse and deconstruction led by Cornell faculty. Thompson said the team will “make a story about preserving and restoring materials” and not simply send salvaged items to landfill, but county staff cautioned that a full, classic deconstruction can raise costs and storage challenges and may not be feasible for every element. The team and county facilities staff noted prior county experience (for example, the Baker Building work) where selective salvage and recycling were feasible but full deconstruction of every element was not.

Parking, access and site alternatives: The team told the committee it will compare on-site parking capacity for a new building against the other options and translate parking differences into capital-cost comparisons. The architects said their SHPO analysis will assume a baseline number of parking spots for the new-building scenario and that retaining existing buildings would require offsets such as structured parking or other mitigation. Committee members asked whether the report should also include an off‑site or greenfield location option (for example, outside Ithaca) so SHPO would understand alternatives; the team said including that analysis could help show due diligence and that it might be useful to include the off-site option in the comparative report if the committee decides it is a credible alternative.

Department relocation and operational planning: The team said program verification—a current workstream that collects detailed department surveys, org charts and adjacencies—has resumed and will inform operational decisions such as the number and location of conference rooms and shared services (for example, centralized transactional counters). The team said it met with departments on February 14, asked for homework due February 25, and scheduled follow-up meetings the week of March 3. County staff raised IT contingency planning: Annex C (which currently houses IT) may require two moves (temporary and final) and the county has about 7,000 square feet available on the fifth floor of the Mental Health Building as a potential temporary location if the committee approves on-site deconstruction sequencing that staggers building removals.

Next steps and follow-up studies: Thompson outlined additional studies that will follow a positive SHPO determination: hazardous materials and abatement surveys (to identify asbestos, lead and PCBs), geotechnical testing (foundation type, likely piles), a parking and traffic analysis including public-transport access, a security/risk analysis using recent incident data, and a city-utility capacity analysis (power, waste, etc.). Thompson said community engagement planning will begin once the site is confirmed.

Committee concerns and constraints: Committee members repeatedly emphasized the county’s long-standing objective to keep the center of government in the county seat downtown and flagged socioeconomic impacts—accessibility for residents without cars, public-transport connections, and downtown economic activity. County staff noted that state or federal funding for the project would trigger preservation review and other compliance obligations. Facilities staff cautioned that more ambitious deconstruction and reuse increases cost and requires immediate markets or storage for salvaged materials.

Ending: Holt Architects said that if SHPO clearance proceeds without major follow-up, deconstruction of at least two of the buildings could begin this year; county staff said they will not start expensive abatement work before SHPO confirms the site because that would risk spending on a site that might not be used. The committee asked the project team to return with more detail on projected operational savings (adjacency efficiencies), and the team said it will provide additional reports on changes in departmental space data, reuse potential from the Cornell study, and proposed community engagement plans.