If you’ve driven down State Street over the last 63 years heading to downtown Boise, you likely know the three-story Idaho Transportation Department headquarters .
From the outside, the Philip E. Batt building’s turquoise facade stands as a quietly imposing figure surrounded by 44 acres of mostly grass and parking lots on the corner of State and Whitewater Park Boulevard. Several smaller buildings dot the campus to the building’s south and east.
But the interior has become an eerie vestige of the past after frozen pipes in a penthouse mechanical room started a cataclysmic flood on Jan. 2, 2022, that forced the Idaho Transportation Department to vacate it. The building has sat empty for nearly three years.
Now, state leaders are faced with a difficult choice with what to do with the building after new estimates released Thursday showed the cost to repair the campus is nearly double what lawmakers cited.
The Department of Administration initially told lawmakers that repairing the building could cost anywhere from $32.5 million to $63 million based on a rough estimation. That estimate did not take into account the scope of the flood damage and was based on general reconstruction costs. The new, more in-depth estimates showed it would cost at least $64 million.