Proposals Submitted For County Complex

Thirteen developers have responded to the county's request for proposals to build a new home for Loudoun County's government, and most of the sites are outside the county seat of Leesburg.

Only five developers proposed locations in Leesburg for a new government complex. The other eight sites are in eastern Loudoun, the part of the county that has experienced the most rapid population growth.

The eastern sites, in the Sterling, Ashburn and Dulles areas, include Dulles Town Center and One Loudoun, a planned mixed-use development off Route 7 in Ashburn that was approved by county supervisors in January.

County officials say the government center on Harrison Street in downtown Leesburg, which opened a decade ago, does not have enough space to house a staff that has mushroomed along with the county's population.

The Board of Supervisors has yet to decide whether to build another center and how such a project would be financed. But the prospect that Leesburg could lose more than 1,000 county employees who eat, shop and do business in town has set off alarm bells at city hall.

If the government center moves east, it could devastate the historic downtown, which has struggled to remain a vibrant center of locally owned businesses and community organizations, said Leesburg Vice Mayor Susan B. Horne.

"This Town Council expends a great deal of effort and resources to preserve that vitality and grow that vitality, and having the county government based in town has really been a key part of that," she said.

Moving the government complex to eastern Loudoun also could create more traffic problems for the town, with county employees who live west of Leesburg driving through town to get to work, Horne said.

The Town Council has set up a task force to investigate ways to persuade the county not to move out of Leesburg.

County officials said last week they needed to conduct a staff review of the proposals and did not have any comment on the location issue.

Loudoun's population has grown nearly 60 percent since 2000, and the government has grown along with it. County officials hope to move into a multi-building complex of at least 500,000 square feet in a lively commercial area with plenty of parking, whether in Leesburg or another location.

At the same time, they have said there are no plans to move court operations out of Leesburg. And they have indicated they would probably hold on to the 158,561-square-foot Harrison Street building, possibly using it to house court employees, who are running out of space in the Loudoun County Courthouse on Market Street.

Because of limited space in the Harrison Street center, a third of county employees work in leased buildings. County officials have calculated that taxpayers spend about $4 million a year in rent, more than the cost of owning and operating the same amount of space.

The county's deadline for receiving developers' proposals was Feb. 21. Tina M. Borger, the county's procurement manager, said she had expected about a half-dozen proposals and was surprised to get 13.

"I think all of them offer something interesting," she said. "The schedule gives us four to 10 weeks to evaluate the proposals, and I believe we're going to need every one of those 10 weeks."

An evaluation committee will narrow the proposals to a handful of the most promising. Then, if the Board of Supervisors decides to go forward with a new center, the finalists would resubmit their proposals in more detail before a winner is selected.