As the pandemic emerged and we shifted some staff to remote work, our office space was suddenly underutilized. Ours was one of several office spaces seeking to end rental leases and move our people into ODOT-owned buildings. To date, including CCD, the agency has successfully eliminated 6 leases and is working on two more.

ODOT’s budget includes the cost of operating all our own buildings, so what we pay in lease payments are additional expenditures. When we end a lease and move into an owned building, eliminating the lease payment is true savings. With forecasted budget shortages, this is a significant saving that we are very excited about.

What are we saving?

Since we are moving mid-biennium, we took the rent money budgeted for the rest of the current biennium and applied that to the cost of the move. Thus, moving costs are being paid out of the savings from eliminating this biennium’s rent cost, meaning next biennium we will realize the full rent savings.

The total unused budget for future rent is $950,000. The move portion of the project costs approximately $240,000. Due to the buildings at our East Salem Complex being older with insufficient IT equipment to support our service needs, we chose to upgrade all IT systems in both buildings ahead of our move. We anticipate these upgrades to provide approximately 25 years of fast and efficient network capability. We also made structural upgrades, including the creation of a customer service lobby. The total construction and IT costs were roughly $900,000. Therefore, the savings in rent covered all move costs and most of the construction and IT upgrades. Our customers will have an excellent building at their service when they conduct business with us, and next biennium we will see a true savings of $2.8M!

For any questions about our move, please contact our Communications Team.

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