Lake County, Florida has an architectural design crisis, and FiscalRangers.com invites the public to help provide creative designs for the new EOC center.
Please forward a link to this contest announcement to any Lake County citizen who may want to know about this contest.
Readers know that the Lake County, Florida Commissioners (Hill, Cadwell & Stewart) recently approved to spend $11-million on a new Emergency Operations Center (EOC) building even after the cost estimate DOUBLED and the non-Federally funded portion grew to $7-million. Basically, three County Commissioners didn't care about the economy, or public input, and committed two future years of sales tax revenue to the building, plus other funds that could have retained some laid off employees instead. And, they never discussed the added annual operating costs for the building
So, we here at the FiscalRangers HQ decided that the building should at least have a memorable design, and the public should be able to submit design ideas for this building, rather than just accept the design from the boring architects.
The picture below is one possible design for the new EOC center.
The contest rules are below.
No Democrats or spendthrift County Commissioners were harmed or portrayed in the sample design shown.
Rules for the FiscalRangers.com EOC Design Contest:
So, the FiscalRangers EOC Design Contest is on. Here are the rules:
- Pictures or drawings are required, with a few paragraphs (limited to one page) explaining the design concept and components discussed below.
- The original reason for this building was to use $3+ million in "free - no cost to the County" Federal grants just for new space for managing Emergencies, which only occured about 15 total days in the most recent 4 years. Thus one design motif might be to support disaster related designs like pictured at the left, with a secondary use as a tourist attraction.
- Remember the building is to be about 30,000 square feet, stand up to 160+mph winds, hold 40 emergency workers (and laptops, bunkbeds and kitchen), plus space for 130 Sheriff and EMS dispatchers, and two inside golf cart parking spaces. Your budget, as approved by County Commissioners, is $11-million of Federal and local taxfunds.
- No boring buildings. Lake County Government needs to compete with the Tavares Splash park and the Mount Dora lighthouse for a unique, "signature" building design.
- Name of the building must be specified. You can't include "Cadwell" in the name, because there already is a park using that name. You CAN propose commercialization of the name by specifying a sponsor, such as the "Pella 160mph Window Disaster center" after Pella Windows. Please use a name that results in a memorable and catchy acronym, such as BLOWHARD, HARDLYUSED or DITMO.
- Alternate Space Usage Plan: You must specify a plan for alternate uses of the EOC space reserved for "emergencies", such as the picture of a temporary homeless cat shelter at left. The staff has said it would be used for training, but never defined a plan for that, or why vacated space could not be used. For instance, "emergencies" requiring use of the EOC space for emergency operations only require the space for about 2-3 weeks per year. Over the last four years, the existing "emergency operations center" space in the County administration building was only "activated" about 15 days. Now, they have to leave the room setup with laptops and equipment so they can be up and running within 1-3 hours if an emergency exists. So, you need to propose an alternatve use of about 10-15,000 sf of EOC space for the other 350 or so days in the year (which was not clearly defined in proposals to the Board). Our proposal is to use the space, as pictured, for homeless cats monitored on internet cameras by the staff at the County Pet Shelter. The cats can easily be herded into the dispatch side of the building when the EOC center is needed for emergencies.
- No seaplanes should be involved in the design. This is a Lake County building, not a City of Tavares building.
- No caricatures of Alan Grayson or other Democrats will be accepted as the design motif. Charlie Crist, maybe, since he has presided over many disasters, like implementing ethanol in gas, the Greer incidents, and he DID visit the Tavares Wooton Park once on a campaign visit, where he left the stage to assist a person with heatstroke (known as a photo op, or mini-mergency). However, none of these emergencies resulted in an activation of the Lake County EOC center.
- The grand prize winner will receive $50 real dollars. Runner up will get an old copy of the County budget, and third place will get a CD with videos of the earlier presentations, public input on the EOC center, and a list of the actual, published financial details and objective analysis used to justify the project (which is currently a blank page).
- The WORST design will get the biggest loser award, a leftover "Ross Biehling for Congress" sign, since he cluttered up the Lake County roads with so many of them in illegal places during the primary elections, and still lost. We are watching the posting of political signs during this general election, and reserve the right to subsitute another sign as biggest loser award if current candidates do not play nice with their signs (like post them right in front of an opponent's sign, or post them in center dividers, bridge barriers, etc.)
- Tie-breaker requirements. If you incorporate one or more of these elements into your design presentation, they will be used to make decisions in case of a tie:
- if you incorporate an antique wood boat (Chris Craft, etc) into the design presentation. The City of Tavares dropped featuring them in literature once they got the Antique Wood Boat show moved to Tavares and then became a "SeaPlane" city. Now is the chance for the County to adopt a signature special interest and prevent the Wood Boat Show moving to Groveland (since they didn't get the indoor ski park) or Eustis (since they cut down all the old trees on Main St., and need some wood somewhere in downtown).
- If you include a POSITIVE design element featuring Newt Gingrich, Jimmy Conner (who voted against the expensive EOC center), Mario Rubio, Daniel Webster, Daniel Boone (my distant relative) or ANY living or deceased Stivender (for local flavor). You can also propose a feature related to some other Lake County founding family.
- Using GREEN design elements. Lake County staff is big on GREEN projects. They have spent thousands on fancy GREEN brochures, a GREEN fair, etc. but no funds on job fairs, seminars to help fill foreclosed homes or other current economic problems. So, an idea related to a green design technique like this picture of a house built from recycled beer cans would help you get tiebreaker points. Just painting the building green doesn't count.
Conclusion
Let your creative juices flow, and submit one entry per email with drawing or picture (one or more of the same design) and explanatory text (limited to one page) in an email to FiscalRangers@comcast.net . You can enter more than once, but do so in separate emails. In the email subject line, enter "FiscalRangers.com EOC design contest submission - "project title" from yourname".
Deadline for contest submissions is November 5th. All designs will be posted on the blog and you can retain design rights if it is actually used by the County. We will hold a vote for the winner after November 5th.
Please forward a link to this contest announcement to any Lake County resident who may want to contribute a contest entry.
Here is an Example of another Design Contest that Actually was Implemented
There is a precedence for this, and I will actually take credit.
Back in the early 1970's, when I was a student at San Fernando Valley State College in California, the college received a new name change to California State University, Northridge (CSUN).
I was the student representative on the campus facilities committee, and the architect came in with a boring stone wall spelling out the new name to install as the new entrance of the campus (which has 40,000 students now).
So, I proposed they have a contest in the art department for a sculptured sign in lieu of spending the budgeted $40,000 for the boring stone wall.
They had the contest, and the result is still at the main entrance for the college, and it spells out the name "CSUN" in 8 foot tall sculptured characters. But what is unique, is the the sculpture is three dimensional and if you arrive drive North on one street, or East on the cross street, you see the same CSUN from two different approach directions. This unofficial logo appears in many CSUN publications.
This is what the CSUN website says about it:
“CSUN” Sculpture
On the southeast edge of campus sits one of the most interesting and unique identifiers of the University: the multi-dimensional CSUN sign sculpture. The design, selected from a campus wide competition, was developed by engineering student John Banks in 1975. The impressive work spells out C-S-U-N when viewed from north, south, east or west.
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