Construction bid awarded for new national forest office at Kamiah

Work on a new headquarters office for the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest at Kamiah is expected to begin this summer.

The agency, that no longer has the workforce or budget to maintain its trail, road and recreation infrastructure as it once did, announced recently that it awarded a contract to Deary-based Quality Contractors LLC to build the $9 million, 15,000-square-foot office building that will be home to about 70 permanent and part-time employees. The two-story structure will be energy efficient and prominently feature local wood building materials.

“One of our primary design goals is to showcase wood as an affordable and sustainable building material with diverse applications,” said Forest Supervisor Cheryl Probert in a news release “Our forests are a major contributor to the wood products industry, and I am excited to showcase this connection in our new Supervisor’s Office. I hope that our building can inspire others to use wood in their own projects.”

The agency has been on a building spree in north central Idaho. In 2007, it opted out of a long-term lease for a building that was home to the Nez Perce National Forest headquarters at Grangeville. In its place, the agency had a new 24,500-square-foot building constructed and is leasing it for $741,000 per year.

Seven years later, the then-separate Nez Perce and Clearwater national forests merged into a single management unit. The headquarters of the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest was moved to Kamiah and many employees who had worked at supervisor’s offices in Orofino and Grangeville were relocated there.

That left the old 30,000-square-foot Clearwater National Forest Supervisor’s Office, which also housed employees of the North Fork Ranger District, half-empty. Like the building abandoned in Grangeville, the Orofino office was also in desperate need of technology upgrades, according to the agency.

Forest Service officials again opted out of a long-term lease for that structure and last year employees of the ranger district moved into a new 8,000-square-foot building that the agency is renting for $383,560 annually over the next 20 years.

Unlike the new offices in Orofino and Grangeville, the federal government will own the new digs in Kamiah. The office will be constructed on a 9-acre parcel owned by the federal government. Quentin Smith, a staff officer for the forest, said agency leaders considered many options including leasing, remodeling existing office space at Kamiah and building a new office.

“Ultimately a decision to construct a building at the existing site was made due to a number of factors that included maintaining a public presence along (U.S. Highway 12), life cycle cost analysis, the availability of a suitable Forest Service lot, operational efficiency, and providing the best possible service to the public,” Smith wrote in an email to the Tribune.

He added the agency does not own property in Grangeville or Orofino that would be suitable for office space.

Construction of the new office is expected to be complete in the fall of 2021.

Barker may be contacted at ebarker@lmtribune.com or at (208) 848-2273. Follow him on Twitter @ezebarker.