The fate of two downtown Redmond buildings is up in the air after the city’s Downtown Urban Renewal Advisory Committee updated city council Oct. 24 on possible future uses for the Evergreen gym and the current police station.

Neither of the two buildings are designated as historic buildings, according to members of the urban renewal advisory committee, and could be torn down to make way for new projects as the city continues to grow.

The Evergreen gym — which is not safe to enter due to its poor roof and foundation — was opened in the early 1920s and served as a school gymnasium. Urban renewal committee members said it would cost around $10 million dollars to make it useable again or around $500,000 to demolish.

The current police station, at 777 SW Deschutes Ave., may be demolished once the police department moves to the new $42 million public safety building in 2025. No final decisions were made.

Redmond police station

The fate of the downtown police station was said to be high priority, given that crews plan to break ground on a new facility in February.

Monica Huey, chair of the Urban Renewal Advisory Committee, said that housing could be a possibility for the old location, but noted it would make more sense to build something community-oriented in the space. Some ideas floated include an art center or a co-working space, she said.

Brandon Cook-Bostick, co-chair of the Urban Renewal Advisory Committee, said family-oriented amenities and housing remain top priorities for the space. He said it would make sense to demolish the current building, then establish a green space or a parking lot until a more permanent plan can be agreed on for the prime location just down the block from Centennial Park and the in-construction Deschutes County Library.

Still, everyone know how badly housing is needed in Redmond.

“We do believe this would be a good project to potentially see high-density housing. Maybe storefronts on one level, or parking, and then housing above that,” Cook-Bostick said. “A couple to three stories. Or based on its location, a bunch of other family-centric things, like the ice rink and the park that are already in this area.”

WDevin Lewis, Redmond’s chief of police, said he and his colleagues aren’t losing any sleep over having to soon vacate their old building.

“If we had the opportunity to move in tomorrow, we’d take it,” Lewis said. “I can tell you that as far as myself, and pretty much everybody that works here, we are looking forward to getting to move into a much larger, a much more state of the art, efficient, and improved, public safety facility.”

For the vast majority of people at the department, Lewis said the time to move to the new station couldn’t come fast enough.

“Just being able to have a facility where we will all have enough space, our own office space, and an area for secure parking for everybody that works here. And enough parking out in the front for people coming to the police department for police business,” Lewis said. “Those seem basic, but we don’t have those right now.”

The only thing he will miss, Lewis said, is the current police station’s downtown location close to community events and city hall.

Lewis said everything is going to plan on the new facility. t this point, efforts are focused on getting the design and development phase complete so permit applications can go out in time for a February groundbreaking.

Lewis said that rising construction costs, a factor that complicated plans for other local large capital projects like Redmond’s new $49 million recreation center, are affecting everybody. But he said they are not planning any cutbacks at this time.

“We are working hard with our team through value-engineering and really looking at the plans and looking at the site and the facility and making sure we are going to build a building that is fiscally responsible,” Lewis said. “And we take the $40 million bond that was passed, we want to be physically responsible with that money. It is taxpayers’s money so we want to make sure we get great value for that.”

Evergreen Gymnasium

The Evergreen gym was salvaged when the nearby school was renovated and converted into city hall in 2017. It has been boarded up and unused since the early 2000s.

“We know it has been empty for a pretty long time. There is the possibility that if it were going to be torn down and sold for something in the community then perhaps that would be a higher priority,” Huey said. “But if it is going to be used … by the city as a potential office building, then I think the thought was to let it stay until it is time to tear it down and then build something new there.”

Some ideas thrown around for possible re-uses by the gym location include downtown housing, civic center, art center and potentially a daycare center, Huey said.

It’s much less expensive to tear the building down than remodel it, said the committee. Cook-Bostick said crews would basically have to build a new “building in the building” in order to salvage it, the costs of which is “probably not as feasible as removing the building and then replacing it with something else.”

“We understand there is a lot of nostalgic attachment to the building in the community being the gymnasium for what was once our high school, and then later an elementary school,” Cook-Bostick said.

Mayor Ed Fitch said the Evergreen gym is sentimental to him, but said putting the project on hold for the time being as the advisory committee suggested was the best decision at the time

“I played a lot of basketball in there (the Evergreen gym). My kids played basketball in there. They did plays in there. But it is unusable. In fact it is downright dangerous to be in there,” Fitch said. “We have got a lot of major projects going on. Determining what the best use of that building would be, what the design would be, that is going to be a long process. And that may take a couple years or so.”