Prineville is about two years out from a round of public-building musical chairs, with Crooked River Elementary School, Ochoco Elementary School and Pioneer Memorial Hospital all set to close down once replacement buildings are completed.

In late May, voters approved a bond giving the Crook County School District the funds to construct a new 700-student elementary school to replace the two older, smaller schools. A week and a half later, St. Charles Health System announced the purchase of a 20-acre site near downtown Prineville where it plans to build a new, $30 million hospital.

Construction of both facilities is expected to be complete in mid-2015, opening up three large, centrally-located properties and tens of thousands of square feet of vacated buildings for renovation or redevelopment.

While sale to a private developer is a possibility for any of the three sites, the school district, the city of Prineville and Crook County are in the early stages of exploring the conversion of two of the buildings to a new public purpose.

The school district is considering Crooked River Elementary School as a possible district office, a move that would allow the administrative office to move out of its leased space and operate under the same roof as other district departments that are currently scattered across multiple buildings in Prineville.

Jointly, the city of Prineville and Crook County are studying the possibility of turning the hospital into a “justice center,” a facility that in concept could include both the city police department and the county Sheriff’s Office, the district attorney’s office and district court, and a jail large enough to end the practice of renting jail beds from Jefferson County and turning lower-level offenders free.

Schools

Deen Hylton, facilities director for the school district, said the district has had some discussions of what to do with the two schools, but that it’s still to soon to be making any definitive determinations.

Ochoco Elementary School, located at the confluence of three highways on the west side of downtown Prineville, is a likely candidate for demolition, Hylton said. The building isn’t unsafe, he said, but a buyer would likely be able to construct the building of their choice for less than it would cost to remodel it.

Crooked River Elementary also needs a lot of work, Hylton said. He said the floors are in particularly poor condition, but as a district office, the building would experience comparatively little wear and tear and could likely be converted at a reasonable cost.

Hylton said the construction of the new elementary school in the Iron Horse neighborhood and the new hospital that will be built on the former Ochoco Lumber site on Southeast Combs Flat Road should help the city make a better impression on individuals contemplating a move to Prineville.

“People, they want to move to a community that has good schools; they want to move to a community that has a new hospital that can take care of their medical needs,” he said.

A new possibility has emerged since the passage of the bond, Hylton said, that would leave one of the elementaries open for one additional year. Students who would otherwise attend Cecil Sly Elementary School would attend whichever school remained open for the 2015-16 school year, he said, relieving the district of the pressure to complete $2.5 million in renovations at Cecil Sly during the summer break.

Ultimately, the health of the real estate market will play a large role in whatever the district does, Hylton said.

“If we have a good market in two or three years, and it better serves us to sell it and spend the money elsewhere, like in repayment of the bond or something like that, that’s probably what the board will do,” he said.

Justice center

Steve Uffelman, president of the Prineville City Council and a Realtor, said unless Prineville’s real estate market sees a significant turnaround soon, it may be difficult to find private buyers for any of the properties that will be vacated. While Uffelman approves of a recently approved study by the city and county governments to examine the hospital’s potential as a justice center site, he said there could be challenges ahead if they decide to proceed — moving the jail deeper into a residential area could be contentious.

“I know there are a lot of people in that neighborhood who are not very excited about the idea,” he said.

Uffelman and Crook County Commissioner Ken Fahlgren both cited the condition of the buildings housing the police, sheriff’s department and jail as a factor in exploring the justice center concept. The 16-bed jail is rated as poorly as any in the state, Fahlgren said, and a recent study of the ability of the buildings to survive an earthquake suggested they would fare poorly. A magnitude 4.0 quake — a rare, but not impossible occurrence in Central Oregon — would be particularly bad for the police department.

“It would completely implode and destroy the entire building,” Fahlgren said.

Fahlgren cautioned the feasibility study is just an initial step. Bringing police and the sheriff’s office under one roof and improving courtroom security — the courtrooms in the county’s 100-year-old courthouse have no metal detectors or bag scanners — is a worthy goal, he said, but if the hospital cannot be reasonably remodeled to include a jail, the entire idea will likely be abandoned within the next six months.

Crook County Sheriff Jim Hensley said the lack of jail space has taken the teeth out of Crook County’s parole and probation department. Currently, individuals found in violation of their parole or probation rarely do jail time due to the unavailability of beds.

“They use that as a sanction to say, ‘Look, you have to do what the court says,’” he said. “Right now, parole and probation, because of where we’re at, they struggle to keep people in compliance with their probation.”

Hensley said the justice center concept could allow jail staff to end the practice of “matrixing” inmates — releasing those deemed a lower risk in order to open up beds for higher-risk offenders. Crook County currently rents 16 beds in the Jefferson County jail but still releases inmates regularly, he said, and deputies spend a great deal of time ferrying inmates back and forth from Jefferson County to court appearances in Prineville. The newly convicted often must wait days or weeks to begin serving their time.

“Adequate, right now, to cover them I would say we need 50 beds a day. I’m saying that’s a comfortable figure, in other words. I’m saying a few of them might not be full all the time, but they’d be there if needed,” Hensley said.