It's official: Los Angeles County is buying the Gas Company Tower.

On November 6, following a legally-mandated notification period, the Board of Supervisors voted to spend up to $205 million to purchase the 1.5-million-square-foot office tower at 555 W. 5th Street. The agreement would also include air space rights accounting for 1,184 parking spaces at the nearby World Trade Center complex.

According to a staff report, the move was prompted by the unprecedented decline in the Downtown office market seen in the aftermath of the global pandemic. By acquiring a building that was appraised at $632 million just four years ago, the County can move staff from leased space and a stock of aging buildings into a modern tower completed in 1991, while also saving money over time.

The County had reviewed 42 different buildings in the Downtown area before moving forward with the transaction, eventually narrowing its search to six buildings, and then touring three. It is expected that the Gas Company Tower will serve as back offices for the County, rather than housing public-facing functions.

The County's real estate portfolio includes 16.5 million square feet of offices, with $195 million spent annually on leased space. Of buildings actually owned by the County, nearly half are more than 50 years old, and 40 percent of County-owned properties are considered to be in "very poor" or "poor" conditions.

Of the County's properties, 33 office buildings have been found to be in need of seismic retrofit, including the mid-century Hall of Administration at Temple Street and Grand Avenue. The cost of retrofitting these structures is reportedly in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Despite that cost, the vote to move forward was not unanimous. Supervisor Janice Hahn cast the lone dissenting vote, whose father's name adorns the Hall of Administration.

"I went by the proposed building the other day and I felt nothing," said Hahn. "It is a soulless building in the middle of a bunch of tall buildings. That isn’t what County Government should look like. I don’t think we need to be in a skyscraper-- we need to be near the people."

The move comes as the 52-story Gas Company Tower is about to lose its namesake tenant. The Southern California Gas Company announced earlier this year that it will relocate into a 200,000-square-foot space in the nearby 2Cal office tower. At the time that the potential purchase by the County came to light, it was reported that the tower was only 50 percent leased.

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