Wake County Staff Favor Office Park Site for New General Services Building; Plan Includes Library Administration and Housing Option

David Rutherford, deputy director of Facilities Design and Construction, presented a conceptual plan July 9 recommending the Wake County Office Park as the preferred location for a consolidated General Services Administration (GSA) facility. Rutherford said the recommendation followed a program-confirmation process, site test fits and a review of response-time needs to county facilities.

Rutherford said GSA currently operates from two primary Wake County sites—401 Capitol Boulevard (about 123,000 square feet on roughly six acres) and a smaller facility at the North Wake landfill campus—and that the agency now maintains county buildings and a fleet far larger than it did 25 years ago. He described the consolidation objective as combining five core GSA functions—administration and support, fleet operations, physical plant, safety and security, and field/facility services—into a single, modern facility sized to serve a 20-year horizon.

Todd Dalton of CPL Architects said program work and staff questionnaires yielded a projected building program in the roughly 200,000–207,000 square-foot range with an associated need for approximately 14–20 acres, depending on how the design handles vertical parking and floor plate geometry. That footprint and circulation needs guided the search for possible sites inside a defined “heat map” of service-demand nodes, Rutherford said. The Wake County Office Park emerged as the top-ranked option because it is county-owned, has two points of access to major highways, sits near industrial uses compatible with fleet operations, and provides flexibility for phasing and multiple future uses.

The conceptual site plan in the presentation folds several county needs into a phased redevelopment: primary new GSA facility and an adjacent Library Administration Building (LAB) in phase one; potential future county office buildings and a parking deck in later phases; and an exploratory area for affordable housing of roughly 5–5.5 acres that the study estimated could support about 90 units in three-story buildings with parking (the plan flagged transit and grocery access as assets). Todd Dalton said the LAB and GSA functions share program similarities (warehouse/loading, training and administrative space) and that co-locating them improves cost efficiency and operational flexibility.

Rutherford said the conceptual program assumes a construction-manager-at-risk delivery method; staff plan to bring a request to authorize that delivery method in July and to return to the board with schematic design this fall (September/October) and site-plan activity through the rest of the fiscal year. The budget figure cited in the packet for the consolidated program and the LAB was $117.5 million in existing capital planning—about $91.0 million attributed to the GSA component plus $26.5 million from an existing library bond allocation—and Rutherford said the $91.0 million estimate excludes any potential proceeds from sale of the existing downtown GSA site (401 Capitol Boulevard).

Commissioners broadly praised the selection of the Office Park site and raised implementation questions. Commissioners asked about traffic studies and impacts to the adjacent historic Olivia Raney Library and Oak View Park; Rutherford said traffic analysis and careful construction staging would be next steps and that operations would be staged to maintain access to park and library properties. Several commissioners asked whether affordable housing could be denser; staff said three stories fit the park context but higher density options could be studied. Manager’s office staff noted that any required rezoning would be handled by the City of Raleigh and that phasing for housing would require subdivision and separate rezoning or development agreements.

Rutherford said the consolidation is intended to serve a 20-year program horizon and that the Office Park option scored well on response-time targets to the downtown campus and detention facilities. Staff will continue design refinement and community engagement; no decision or appropriation was required at the work session.