COVID-19 didn’t slow construction in Hutchinson as the city saw 36 new single-family homes or duplexes built in 2020.
“That’s the highest we’ve had in Hutchinson since prior to the Great Recession,” said Dan Jochum, Hutchinson's building, planning and zoning director.
Jochum presented his annual report to the City Council last week, and while the steady home construction is good news for the growth of the city, it’s created a new issue in the number of available lots.
“When I first started giving this report 10 years ago, we had close to 400 lots on the books,” Jochum said. “Right now we’re down to 133 lots available in town. Generally speaking, communities like to have a five-year supply of lots available.”
Jochum said the city is receiving more inquiries from developers interested in platting new areas for development, and this is an issue the city will likely have to discuss more as the year goes on.
The 36 new homes accounted for $7.5 million of the $15.8 million in new construction in 2020. Other big builds included the Riteway Conveyors facility ($3.6 million), Century Court West’s fourth building ($1.7 million), the Hutchinson High School bleachers and scoreboard ($1.3 million), Dollar General ($775,684) and Lighthouse Counseling Center ($477,556).
There was also $19.8 million worth of commercial and industrial additions and remodels, led by the West Elementary addition at $12.3 million. Other major projects included the Prince of Peace addition ($2.3 million), the Marshall’s remodel ($1.5 million), and reroofing 3M ($1 million).
All together, Hutchinson’s construction valuation in 2020 was $41.4 million, the fourth largest in history. It’s all a positive sign for the community, Jochum said, as people are willing to invest in Hutchinson’s growth. And of course that growth is good for tax payers.
“That’s not what we collected in fees or anything like that, that’s just the value added to the community in terms of the tax value,” Jochum said. “Any time you’re adding valuation like this, it helps so that tax burden can be spread out.”
While construction activity has remained strong in Hutchinson despite the pandemic, Jochum admitted it’s difficult to predict whether it will continue to be so in 2021. But there are larger projects on the horizon, such as the new Hutchinson police department, the Civil Air Patrol statewide training facility, a Century Court West addition and Park Elementary remodel.
Services and inspections
Like many things in 2020, the usual business of the building, planning and zoning department was disrupted by the pandemic. With COVID-19 restrictions in place, inspectors had to find new ways to do their job.
“With state guidelines, we’re really not supposed to be going into people’s occupied homes with COVID,” Jochum said. “Obviously, life goes on, people are doing a lot of home improvement projects, so we’ve utilized Zoom and have done live inspections … where you have a homeowner walking around the house showing us various things that need to be looked at, and we’re doing the inspection virtually.”
The city issued 839 building permits and completed 2,275 inspections. One service the city has not continued during the pandemic is the rental inspection program, which has been paused since March 2020. The plan is to resume inspections when they’re allowable.
“Rental units are still required to be registered with the city annually, just as they always have,” Jochum said. “And we inspect those on a three-year basis, so we’ll just adjust that when we can get back into the rental units.”
