It's amazing how much things cost nowadays.
That sounds like the broken refrain coming from the pipes of an old man pining for the days of his youth, when costs seemed more reasonable and our dollars went predictably farther.
It is not. It is a simple observation about how much it will cost to take down the now-beyond-saving Kress building in the 100 block of West Broad Street in downtown Texarkana.
After years of yipping and yapping about whether to do it our not, the city has finally come up with an amount it is willing to pay to tear it down, take it away and salvage some of its best architectural features.
That amount is half a million dollars.
The city may quibble that figure is too high. The official amount the city says it will pay for the project is $465,750-a very unrounded number. But there have already been expenses relating to evaluating the structure, and there will be other unbudgeted expenses and probably contractor overruns. And when workers start clearing out the rubble, you don't know what other hidden issues they might dig up.
Half a million dollars is a fair figure.
Only a couple of years back, the estimated cost of demolishing the building was about $300,000. That's inflation for you.
Think about it: $500,000 to remove the rubble from behind an old storefront, secure the area and do a bit of salvage work and hopefully preserve the facade-a facade that at one time was worth preserving.
Many Kress stores-a chain of five-and-dime department stores that had an 80-year run before petering out by the end of the 1970s-were architecturally significant buildings, unique in design, a reflection of Samuel H. Kress' desire to make his stores "works of public art." Many have been restored.
That will not happen here. Cities aren't generally in the business of developing this type kind of property. At best, they offer incentives to encourage development and preservation. But because of a decision made years ago, they are now in the mess-cleaning-up business.
The problem is that everyone with an eye toward preservation waited too long to do anything. The city was caught holding the bag, a victim of accepting a well-intended donation. And in the eight years since, the city's financial ability to take on such a renovation project has only worsened, while the cost of such an effort has increased proportionally.
The old adage "a stitch in time saves nine," is an apt description of what happened.
Of course, only old guys (or gals) pining for the days when costs were reasonable and the dollar stretched farther, would understand what a stitch in time means. It's about sewing, and mending in particular.
It means if you have a small hole in your sock, you should fix it immediately. If you wait, it will take a lot more effort to fix it.
The phrase goes back to the days when women used to mend tears in socks (or other clothing) instead of just throwing them away and buying a new pair. It means if you use one stitch of thread to fix a small hole, you won't have to make nine more stitches to fix a bigger rip.
The building is a loss to the city. It was once worth saving.
But half a million dollars. That's a lot more than nine new stitches.
Think what you could do with that money: Buy 1o top-of-the line quad-cab pickup trucks loaded with accessories. Build two really nice homes in really nice neighborhoods in Texarkana. Raise two kids from birth through college.
That last example comes from the Department of Agriculture in a January report. It estimated a middle-class married couple will spend $$234,000 raising a child born in 2015 to the age of 17-college not included.
That's a lot of money.
(I've never bought into those studies, by the way. If it actually cost that amount, I might have thought twice about expanding my brood and instead moved into a really nice house in a really nice neighborhood here.)
When the privately owned old Masonic Lodge burned and was reduced to a pile of rubble a few years back, I can't image its owner paying even a tenth of what the city is willing to pay to make the Kress building go away. And the Kress building isn't as big.
But there are different challenges with the Kress' remains. As with most downtown buildings, stores sit side by side and share a wall between them. That means its not just about loading up and removing rubble, its about maintaining or establishing the structural integrity of the outer walls-without innards to lock them in place and without damaging adjacent buildings. It's also about safety in the immediate area and environmental concerns that have leached into consideration.
Still, $500,000 is a lot of money. The city must hate spending it on this, beyond what they have publically said.
You almost wish officials would slide $50,000 or $60,000 to a few ranch hands in pickup trucks and let them haul the stuff off in the dead of night. No fuss. No muss. You wake up one morning and think about landscaping for a new pocket park between the existing buildings.
If creative thieves can haul off ATM machines in the middle of night with stolen hydraulic equipment and a stolen moving truck and nobody sees anything, then why can't City Hall find a cheaper way to make this problem go away?
What a money pit.
Maybe we don't all agree on whether the Kress building should have been restoring or razed, but maybe we can agree on this:
Half a million dollars is a lot of money.