The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Vicksburg District office will remain on East Clay Street for another 12 years following lease negotiations between the General Services Administration and Los Angeles-based Saban Capital Group, which owns the building.

Shannon Bussey, chief of acquisition for the real estate division of the Corps Vicksburg District, who worked with the GSA on the lease talks, would not say what the Corps will pay under the lease, but said the total was 8 to 12 percent less than the previous rent the Corps paid on the building.

However, Greg Raimondo, Vicksburg District public information officer, said the lease is “the highest, if not the highest, priced lease in the Corps Mississippi Valley Division,” which covers an area from Minnesota to the mouth of the Mississippi River.

Bussey said companies like Saban invest in buildings for the GSA.

“They specialize in providing build to suit buildings for GSA, which is the landlord for the federal government,” he said. “GSA either owns or leases 99 percent of the buildings the federal government occupies in the United States. Then GSA subleases the buildings to the respective federal agency.”

Although the Corps is an agency within the Department of Defense, it is not located on a military base and had to use GSA on the open market.

“If we were on a military base we would not have to use GSA,” he said. “But because we are using commercial property, we had to negotiate. In this case, we’re no different than Social Security, the Department of Wildlife, (or) Department of Energy; we lease our space the same way they do.

He said the negotiations began after the District’s command realized the building’s rent was the high for the Mississippi Valley. He was directed to work with the GSA to try and “lower that rate and get it to where it was more acceptable to the command, and something we could feel better about as an agency.”

Bussey said negotiations began in 2013 went on for more than two years.
“A lot of that had to do with shrinking the footprint and negotiating from that aspect to reduce the effective rate of the rent, and the second, reduce the footprint and reduce the overall price as well.”

“We’re really a lot like a business in that we have to look at our overhead costs, and those overhead costs take away project costs,” Raimondo said.

One of the things the District has been doing, he said, is reducing its footprint (or presence) inside building.

“We’ve been trying to consolidate offices, because, obviously, we are paying, like everyone pays in business, by square footage,” he said. “We’ve been trying to reduce our footprint inside the building and turn space back over to the building owners.”

Raimondo said technology has enabled the District to reduce space by using systems like computer-assisted design and drawing and scanning documents to be stored on digital files. He said the Corps map sales office was closed because most of the maps are online.

“Anyone who comes in looking for a map, I take them into my office and show them how they can download it.

“When we started in this building, we had the entire building, now we’ve got Social Security working here, The Army Corps of Engineers Office of Information Technology takes up space. We’re down from two full floors to 11/4-floors.

“We’ve gotten lean and mean.”

He said the Social Security office, which occupies the building, must negotiate its on lease, as does the office of Information technology, although Busses said that branch of the Corps relies on the District for assisance.