In its case for leaving Wood Quay for new HQ, council is ignoring retrofit grant, says councillor

“This is only dealing with Camden Yard,” said Rory Flannery, the council’s head of finance, at Monday’s monthly meeting of Dublin City Council. 

Consulting on the future of Wood Quay would kick off soon with councillors, he said – as he went through a presentation on the council’s current strategy.

But the fates of the two massive city centre sites are connected, said councillors.

After all, Chief Executive Richard Shakespeare’s argument for the need to transplant the council’s headquarters from the Civic Offices to the Camden Yard site on Kevin Street is in large part based on the massive sum – about €500 million – he says would be needed to retrofit the Wood Quay buildings.

One leads to the next.

If it were substantially cheaper to fix up the current Civic Offices and stay at Wood Quay, it wouldn’t make financial sense to spend the estimated €338 million to build new offices on the purchased Camden Yard site.

So, Green Party Councillor Janet Horner wanted to know why the council hadn’t factored a central government grant for retrofitting public buildings into its calculations on how much staying at Wood Quay would cost, she said.

The Department of Environment has said it will fund up to 50 percent of the costs of retrofitting projects for public buildings that need to see their BER improved, she said – based on a response to a parliamentary question she had prompted. 

Shakespeare, the council’s chief executive, had told her that he doesn’t believe the Department of Environment, Horner said at the meeting on Monday. 

But council officials urgently need to interrogate that properly, she said, and incorporate that into the options.

But she hasn’t heard back anything from council officials on looking into that more closely, she said at the meeting. “We desperately need to be, to investigate that.”

Flannery, the council executive, said they need to follow up with the department on the fund as they need more information on it. “We don’t think the fund is that big.” 

Later, Horner said that she hasn’t heard a good answer for why they haven’t looked seriously at it.  

“I think that is a massive gap in their analysis and their logic on the financial side of things,” she said. “I think it is wild.”

It’s also unclear, though, which of the elements that make up the council’s estimated costs would be eligible for that pot.

Reports showing what is stuffed into the €500 million-ish cost of retrofitting and refurbishment works for Wood Quay – which include not just energy efficiency measures but other changes – still aren’t public.

The only report into upgrades at Wood Quay that is public is one drawn up in July 2019 that listed 11 changes that could be done to make substantial energy savings. At the time, those would cost about €1.7 million, that report says.

At the meeting, Flannery and his colleague Aidan Blighe said a meme-able number of times that councillors were really welcome to come in for lengthy one-to-one private briefings on the reports that haven’t been released publicly. 

They’re commercially sensitive as officials are talking to contractors, they said.

But many councillors said they just don’t have the expertise to understand and analyse each detail in giant technical reports – and said there’s need for much greater scrutiny.

They need those reports to be public, so they can provide oversight and check them, working with independent experts who they trust, they said – and ensure the public are clued into any decisions too.

Is this just about energy?

Estimates of the works needed to Wood Quay are now magnitudes higher than the €1.7 million – which centered on responses to an “energy audit” – laid out in July 2019.

At the meeting, Flannery said an early high-level estimate of the necessary retrofit work, carried out by Arup Consulting, had come back with a figure of about €250 million. 

Drilling deeper, Flannery said, another group of consultants had then estimated the cost at between €487 million to €504 million, depending on whether all the construction was done in one go, or if it was phased.

This can be compared to the estimated costs of the proposed Camden Yard project. 

The council has paid €104 million to buy the site, and a presentation Shakespeare gave councillors in February estimated it would cost €338 million to build the new council offices, €102 million for the additional offices they plan to let out, and €141 million to build some housing on the site. 

Aside from the financial, the report Flannery presented to councillors on Monday lay out the other arguments for moving the headquarters to planned new-build blocks at Camden Yard.

Key elements of the Civic Offices on Wood Quay are approaching the end of their useful lives, and the council has ambitious climate targets to meet by 2030, the report says.

If they stayed, the council couldn’t consolidate staff from several buildings into the one, and services would be disrupted during all the works on Wood Quay, it says.

And, if the headquarters stays at Wood Quay, the council couldn’t build more than 500 homes there instead, it says. 

Some councillors are suggesting that officials look at building out the Camden Yard site as all homes, as an alternative – but officials say the change in planning permission that would take would add years to the project.

Still though, said Fine Gael Councillor Clodagh Ní Mhuirí, many people just don’t understand why Wood Quay can’t be retrofitted. 

Two blocks were built in 1981, and two other blocks were built in 1994. 

“How can a building that is relatively new not be meeting standards?” said Ní Mhuirí, relaying what constituents have asked her.

The council needs to it explain much better, and why retrofitting isn’t seen as an option, she said.  “I think we need to be a lot clearer as to, kind of, what are the actual issues with that.”

Blighe, an assistant chief executive for human resources and corporate services, said again that officials would be happy to take councillors through detailed reports during one-on-one or group meetings.

But he listed some of the issues, then and there. 

“We’ve major issues with all our [...] heating systems, electricity breakers, the windows, the roofs, the lifts are constantly out of order, they all need to be replaced,” he said. “Even some of the facade is breaking down.”

The council plans to spend to fix some of those issues, anyway though, regardless of the move, the capital budget suggests.

There’s €10.3 million in the capital budget for the next three years for upgrades to Civic Offices at Wood Quay – including €600,000 on lift replacement, and €600,000 on mechanical and electrical capital upgrading works.

Social Democrats Councillor Karl Stanley said that, in his glance at the reports – that have not been publicly released, but councillors have been able to review –  he had noticed that there was €6 million for an IT system included. 

“That’s got nothing to do with refurb,” he said. 

What this says to him is that the business case is being stuffed with numbers to make one option look good and another – the retrofitting – look bad, he said. “We’re not stupid. Please do not do that.”

One big line item in the retrofitting costs that the council has broken out in presentations is how much it would cost to relocate staff away from Wood Quay while works were done.

That could be between €97 million and €158 million – depending on the phasing, says the strategy report.

But that figure is based on assuming staff would have to move to A-grade office locations for up to 15 years, said Stanley. That’s what councillors were told, he said.

He understands that office moves are difficult, he said. But that’s ludicrous and a solution could be found, with staff working from home for a while, or piecemeal moves, he said.

Up to what standard?

A certificate in the Codema-commissioned report from 2019 said the Civic Offices’ BER at that time was D1.

Driving up costs is the idea that they have to bring Wood Quay up to a BER rating of A1, said Stanley, the Social Democrats councillor. 

They don’t have to do that, and could look at a lower target, he said.

It’s unclear how the 11 upgrades costing €1.7 million in the July 2019 report – such as more solar panels, heat pumps, new LED lighting, and air system upgrades – would impact the building’s BER ratings.

But under one scenario, that report predicted a drop in annual electricity use from about 4,030,000 kWh/year to 660,000 kWh/year.

Although, that scenario also forsaw annual gas use go up from 3,300,000 kWh/year to 4,890,000 kWh/year, it says.

There are a couple of targets floating around that relate to upgrading public buildings. One set by the Irish government is to upgrade all public buildings to B2 by 2030.

Another, in the EU’s Energy Efficiency Directive, is to ensure that 3 percent of publicly owned buildings with a total useful floor area of more than 250sqm are retrofitted each year – or the equivalent alternative.

The Irish Government has opted for an alternative, said a response to a parliamentary question issued to Green Party TD Roderic O’Gorman.  

It has said it will ensure that the equivalent projected energy savings are achieved in buildings owned by public bodies by the end of 2030, it says.

It’s bringing in a “renovation passport” – whereby retrofit measures can count towards the target as part of a longer pathway towards zero-energy buildings, the response said.

The department, along with the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI),  is supporting that with two programmes – the Public Sector Energy Efficiency Programme and the Pathfinder Programme. 

The first offers supports, and best-practice sharing to support bodies to deliver energy efficiency improvements, it says.

The second of these includes support for major retrofitting projects, by councils, and in the healthcare and education sector, “offering up to 50% funding for projects, ranging from shallow retrofit to deep decarbonisation”.

The department hasn’t responded to queries about whether the council has engaged with it in relation to these programmes and Wood Quay.

On the phone the day after the council meeting, Horner, the Green Party councillor, said that if the department is investing in measures, across public buildings, they can get efficiencies of scale. 

If the councils and other public bodies all go it alone, she said, the state could end up with far more expensive projects releasing mega-tonnes of embodied carbon and knocking old buildings.

There has to be a national strategy on how to meet these directives, she said, looking at it all across the portfolio of public buildings, and assessing them holistically.

At the monthly council meeting on Monday evening, Lesley Byrne, a Social Democrats councillor, said she understands the argument that council executives can’t release the retrofitting reports, with estimate costs, because of commercial sensitivity. 

But the council has told the public the headline figures for its costs to retrofit Wood Quay, she said.

And, a peer of hers, a quantity surveyor, told her that it would be, by sqm, three times more than the most expensive office fit-out in Dublin city in the last 15 to 20 years, she said. 

She can’t name the surveyor, she said with a slight smile. “Her name, identity and buildings, that’s commercially sensitive too.”

By this point in the meeting, Flannery, the head of finance, was whipping through the responses to councillors. “It’s not all fit-out,” he said, to Byrne of the cost.