There’s no good reason for Flathead County to stall the Agency on Aging building project, Commissioner Cal Scott said Friday.

Scott said he was puzzled by his fellow commissioners’ decision to scrap a $450,000 block grant application for the project because negotiations have been underway to buy an office building south of the courthouse that could make that location much more workable for a new facility to house the senior programs.

“There’s no reason for this, except their own personal connections,” Scott said, referring to Commissioners Gary Krueger and Pam Holmquist’s relationship with the owners of the barn on Kelly Road the county leases for the Agency on Aging. “It’s buffoonery. Gary has thwarted this project at every juncture.”

Scott said he has been negotiating with Conrad Adam, who owns the State Farm Insurance building along South Main Street, for a couple of months.

“I helped him understand the reality of the marketplace... It’s been an educational process on my part,” he said. “The bottom line is both Gary and Pam knew an appraisal was ordered to determine the full market value of that building.”

The appraisal is expected by Thursday, May 2, and the county already has looked at how the Adam building could fit into a building scenario for the Agency on Aging, Scott said.

“They [Gary and Pam] both knew this. By May 3 we could’ve picked a site,” he said, adding that he would support the purchase of the Adam building only if it’s used for the Agency on Aging.

The site south of the courthouse was one of two locations studied in a preliminary architectural report, but county property north of the fairgrounds was the recommended location. A lack of space for future expansion and adequate parking caused the south courthouse location to rank lower.

The report also said the county would need to purchase additional home sites south of the courthouse to accommodate any future expansion. Scott said he evaluated the four homes in question and estimated it would cost $600,000 to buy those homes. That doesn’t include demolition or removal costs.

Though Krueger earlier said he supports the south location and said “we have time to get the parking in order as we grow,” he declined to talk about the south property in a phone interview Friday, echoing Holmquist’s statement that he wants to get through the county budgeting process before he will discuss it further.

“I inherited this thing going in,” he said of the building proposal. “The process needs to have better planning. I don’t know how we go forward.”

Krueger said he’s concerned that cost estimates for both county sites came in well over the $1.4 million and $1.7 million projections made last year when the commissioners held a workshop to consider two options for a building on the north end of the fairgrounds.

Building an 11,000-square-foot facility on a 2-acre site north of the fairgrounds would cost roughly $2.37 million, while building it south of the courthouse campus would cost $2.28 million.

Former Commissioner Dale Lauman said he is disappointed with the commissioners’ decision not to pursue the block grant, but reiterated Friday that when he left office at the end of December there was enough payment-in-lieu-of-taxes money to build a new facility. Those funds are federal payments the county gets annually to offset property tax losses due to non-taxable federal lands.

By the end of June, Flathead County will have $2.5 million in its PILT fund, and is expected to get another $1.9 million for the coming fiscal year, county Finance Director Sandy Carlson said. But it’s not a done deal yet, she added.

From the PILT fund the county has been spending up to $1.3 million a year to allocate $500,000 annually to the road department, pay for accounting and payroll software, auditor fees and a capital lease for heating and cooling equipment, Carlson said. She has proposed transferring the federal money for those expenditures into the general fund, but the commissioners have not yet discussed that option.

Krueger said he wonders if the payment-in-lieu money will continue to keep coming to Flathead County.

Lauman, however, believes the annual allocations will keep coming from the federal government.

“PILT isn’t going away,” Lauman said. “It’s too big a lobby.”

Lauman said he wishes a decision had been made on the building project while he was still in office, but there was some hesitation, he admitted, largely because Scott joined the commission to fill in after Jim Dupont died and had to get up to speed, and Holmquist wasn’t anxious to move forward with it.

Scott said his next move is to provide the “facts and legitimate reasons” to support building an Agency on Aging facility ahead of any other pending capital improvement projects for the county. He said he believes the payment-in-lieu fund can support the building project, and he pointed out the county will have a 25 to 28 percent cash reserve by the end of the fiscal year.

“If that doesn’t indicate we’re healthy enough to fund this, I don’t know what does,” Scott said.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.