The Eugene 4J School District’s long angst over its ownership of the vacant downtown former Wells Fargo building may soon be over.
Lane County has tentatively offered to take the building off the district’s hands for $2.95 million. That means the school district would roughly break even on its real estate adventure after having bought the building in February 2024 for $2,894,000.
In that February purchase, the district handed a quick profit, possibly approaching $600,000, to a group of four Portland real estate brokers who controlled but did not own the building, Eugene Weekly reported earlier this month.
The county is evaluating whether the four-story property at 99 East Broadway could alleviate cramping at the nearby Lane County Courthouse and adjacent Lane County Public Service Building, the county’s administrative headquarters, says county spokeswoman Devon Ashbridge.
“The due diligence phase goes through September,” Ashbridge tells Eugene Weekly. “Both the courthouse building and the Public Service Building are aging and do not provide enough space for the current level of services. If the [district] building passes the due diligence work, the Board of County Commissioners would need to vote to go through with the purchase,” she says.
County, judicial and law enforcement officials have fretted for years about space, saying the 65-year-old courthouse is cramped and inefficient. They floated a plan to have taxpayers fund a $154 million bond to build a new courthouse, but voters in 2019 pummeled that idea.
Yet to be determined are what it might cost the county to remodel the former bank building’s interior and what functions would move in there.
After buying the building in 2024, the school board quickly decided the $10 million remodeling tab was a budget-buster and opted to keep the building empty and put it up for sale at $3.2 million.
The district had spent nearly a year working to buy the place, which ultimately entailed the Portland investors buying the building from Wells Fargo on Feb. 20, 2024, for $2,225,000 and other unspecified “consideration,” and then flipping it to the school district seven days later for $2,894,000.
The district will now incur selling costs. It will need to pay commercial real estate brokers a fee for handling the sale to the county, ranging from $73,750 to $118,000, depending on how many brokers are involved, according to the listing agreement.
Bricks $ Mortar is a column anchored by Christian Wihtol, who worked as an editor and writer at The Register-Guard in Eugene 1990-2018, much of the time focused on real estate, economic development and business. Reach him at Christian@EugeneWeekly.com.