The development team thats pursuing a proposed $50 million-plus office tower in downtown Spokane is working to cut estimated costs enough to ensure the project is viable, and hopes to move forward with construction design this summer.


Were trying to drive out roughly 10 percent of the cost that the initial scoping was showing, says project coordinator Jerry Hagood, adding that the team is making progress in that effort.


The proposed office tower would be developed at the southeast corner of Howard Street and Riverside Avenue. The development team, consisting mostly of downtown property owner K. Wendell Reugh and Hagood, representing Kiemle & Hagood Co., has been working with Thompson Vaivoda & Associates Architects Inc., of Portland, since last fall on the design of the building.


Over the next several months, in addition to whittling down cost figures, the team will be overseeing the completion of schematic drawings and seeking to reach agreements with three prospective anchor tenants that together likely would occupy half or more of the office space in the building, he says.


In order for us to move forward with the phase after the one were in now, we need commitments from those people, says Hagood.


As reported earlier, the growing Spokane law firm of Paine, Hamblen, Coffin, Brooke & Miller LLP is one of the prospective anchor tenants being courted for the new building. Hagood declines to identify the two other prospective anchors, but says, One is well-recognized in Spokane. The other doesnt do a lot of business in Spokane. That one will be a surprise to a lot of people.


Assuming the development team can secure those commitments, it then would need to round up tenants for another 25 percent of the office space in the proposed tower during the six- to eight-month construction-design phase for the project to proceed, Hagood says. That amount of pre-leasing is needed, he says, because, The lender market is going to be very suspicious and doubtful of Spokane being about to pull off a new high-rise building.


With initial scoping work now mostly completed, its expected that the office tower will be an 18-story structure, not counting a mechanical penthouse on top, with a gross total of about 500,000 square feet of floor space.


Plans call for the building to include about 210,000 square feet of leasable office space on the seventh through the 18th floors and a total of about 544 car parking spaces on the second through the sixth floors and on part of the seventh floor. The ground level floor, as envisioned, would have about 26,000 square feet of retail and commercial space. The building also would have one basement level.


Parking is a real dilemma in terms of cost, Hagood says. Its really a necessary evil in any project in downtown Spokane and yet it cant support itself. The above-grade parking garage in the proposed high-rise building essentially just takes care of our tenants and visitors to the building. Were not solving any other parking in the downtown area, if there is a need. Thats the Achilles heel were fighting with, he says.


Despite the cost concerns, Hagood says, Were very much of a mind that we want to create a landmark-type building that doesnt exist in Spokane today. That is an absolute criteria of Wendell Reugh and the anchor tenants.


The Spokane architectural firm of Madsen Mitchell Evenson & Conrad PLLC recently joined the design team on the project and will be working on preliminary tenant schematics, he says.


The development team is aiming for a spring 2002 construction start date, assuming that all else goes well, and would expect the office tower to be completed about two years later.


Reugh and Reugh family interests would own the tower, and Kiemle & Hagood would be the managing and leasing agent for the building. Reugh owns most of the buildings on the block where the tower would be constructed.