The project will include a three-story, 48,000-sf office building, a free standing, 4,000-sf retail bank branch and, in cooperation with Kitsap Transit, an area to drop off and pick up ferry riders. The credit union and Kitsap Transit are acquiring the land for the project from the Bremer Trust, whose sole beneficiary is Olympic College.
"We conducted a cost analysis of our operations ... and concluded there was a need to centralize various functions to achieve greater efficiencies within our system," says Credit Union President/CEO Elliot Gregg. "This new facility will enable us to re-locate many back office member support departments that are currently housed in a variety of leased locations throughout the area (and) simplify our processes, resulting in significant cost savings. It also affords us with a real opportunity to support the City of Bremerton's Revitalization Program."
The developer for the credit union project is Bellevue, WA-based Opus Northwest, which is also the developer of the neighboring $50-million New Center at Bremerton. New Center will consist of a 42,000-sf retail and office building, a 20,000-sf conference center, a 110-room hotel and a 7,000-sf restaurant and a public plaza, all atop three levels of underground parking.
Opus gained the New Center development assignment by winning a city-sponsored design competition. In addition to the public portion of the project -- the conference center, the garage, the public plaza -- for which Opus is the fee developer, Opus was required to design in the office-over-retail building, the hotel and the restaurant as their own speculative developments.
While Opus had a hospitality company lined up to own and operate the hotel, the only tenant Opus had for the speculative office-over-retail project was Kitsap Transit, which prior to the competition had committed to lease the 15,000-sf second floor of the building. Now, however, based on advice from Opus, which has pre-leased 60% of the building, Kitsap Transit has decided to own the entire building instead of merely leasing the second floor, and Opus is now the fee developer as opposed to the owner of the project.
"We went to them and said if you take over ownership of the development, we'll take less profit for having less risk, and you will end of with a building that has a year to completion but already has tenants for four-fifths of the retail space and half of the office space," Opus Project Manager P.J. Santos tells GlobeSt.com. "As well, as a quasi-public agency, Kitsap Transit is getting a phenomenal interest rate on the construction loan."
Santos says what's happening in Bremerton is a prime example of what public investment can accomplish. "Bremerton city leaders said we need to make a public investment and then Opus made a private investment because, given the public infrastructure that was going in, it made sense," says Santos. "And now Kitsap Federal wants to be across the street from the whole thing for the same reasons we got involved."
Santos says he could bring a 50-story office building to fruition in Downtown Seattle and it would never have as positive an effect as this relatively small set of buildings will have on Downtown Bremerton. "The impact this will have on Bremerton is huge, and it's great to be a part of it," says Santos.
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