Central Valley school board votes to move transportation and maintenance headquarters to former Hite Crane facility on Appleway

The Central Valley School District board of directors voted unanimously Monday to sign a five-year lease for the former Hite Crane site at 17515 E. Appleway Ave . to house its District Operations Center, which oversees the maintenance, transportation and facilities departments.

The district moved its administrative offices to Liberty Lake last year and sold its previous administrative campus at 19307 E. Cataldo Ave., agreeing to lease back a portion of the site for $44,000 a month so the District Operations Center could remain there until December. The plan was to move the operations center to the Western State/Cat building at 4625 E. Trent Ave. in December.

Superintendent Ben Small told the board Monday that construction of the new Western State/Cat building along Interstate 90 in Liberty Lake has been delayed and the business will not be able to vacate the Trent location by December as originally planned. Small said he didn’t advise waiting to fix the problem.

“If we wait and hedge our bets, we could be without a facility,” he said.

The five-year lease at the Hite Crane site will begin May 1 and cost $14,000 a month. Once the district moves in, it will be able to end its lease for the Cataldo site six months early, Small said.

While the Hite Crane site is small, it will work in the short-term, Small said. “It does a nice job of filling the gap,” he said. “It is tight. It would work for us, but it’s not big enough to be a permanent facility.”

The owner of the property isn’t interested in selling and would not agree to a lease of less than five years, Small said. There were also several other lease offers on the table if the district didn’t move forward with the lease. If the district doesn’t need the Appleway location for the full five years, it does have the option to do a sublease, Small said. “I believe there could be a use for that facility over the five years, whether it’s us or somebody else,” he said.

Board chairwoman Cindy McMullen said the new lease made financial sense. Extending the lease of the Cataldo site for 18 months would cost the same as leasing the Appleway site for five years, she said. “That would balance out.”