Lake County commissioners have approved a lease agreement that would utilize a former Joann Fabrics store in Tavares as administrative office space for the county’s Supervisor of Elections operations.
The store, located in a shopping center along East Burleigh Boulevard just south of Lake Eustis, is currently in operation as a Joann location until May 31, according to landlord Robert Tamburro.
Terms of the deal include a five-year lease, with a five-year renewal option, and was approved last week with three additional conditions from commissioners.
Conditions include allowing immediate access — while Joann is still in possession of the building — to do air quality and general due diligence checks, authorizing architects Forefront Architectural + Engineering to start initial design work and termination of the bid with no penalty if commissioners decide to back out of the deal.
“My recommendation is to go ahead and get the architect working on this so we can get some drawings to put the project on the street and get some real estimates to know what we’re going to be dealing with,” Lake County Supervisor of Elections Alan Hays said.
Hays said the work of modifying the building into an elections office space would not be a “typical buildout” because of security measures required for county elections facilities.
“We’ve got to have glass that is either bulletproof or bullet-resistant with some laminates on it and that sort of thing,” he said. “…We’ve got to have a generator for standby power because hurricanes occur in August during the primary season, so there are several different things there.”
If the buildout exceeds expected costs or if Lake County officials choose not to go forward with the deal, as part of the agreement, they would be required to give Tamburro 90 days to re-negotiate before termination.
In a commission meeting last October, Hays detailed reasons the current Supervisor of Elections space was insufficient to support its growing operations and advocated for a new facility.
Warehouse space at the current facility — at 1898 E Burleigh Blvd. — is completely full, Hays said, including two storage trailers behind the building and another 4,400 square feet of space leased in another location.
Administrative space in the current facility is also at capacity, with limited lobby and parking space for voters and more office space needed to accommodate staff.
“We’re storing equipment in the hallways and the conference rooms, and that’s not good,” Hays told commissioners last October. “At one point, we had equipment stored in some of the restrooms and that’s not good either. We are absolutely out of room, and we’ve got to have more space,” he said.
In January, commissioners voted against building a new elections center after learning it could cost as much as $22,075,000 to build the facility. A month later, Joann Fabrics announced it would close 500 stores, including all of its Florida locations, as part of the retailer’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Officials with the Supervisor of Elections office quickly saw the opportunity to backfill the soon-to-close Tavares store — just over a mile and a half west down Burleigh Boulevard — and requested approval to negotiate a lease agreement there by March.
Hays estimated that lease improvements and specialty items for the 20,070-square-foot Joann store will cost approximately $3 million.
The agreement was approved 4-1 with Commissioner Anthony Sabatini as the sole dissenter. Sabatini, who was elected in November, described the deal as a “serious want” but not a need and said he would not raise taxes to support it.
“That was a lot of details for a contract that I don’t think there’s an evidentiary factual basis for,” he said. “We just don’t need it right now. The elections are doing great, we’re doing great in Lake County.”
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