GRAND FORKS – The Grand Forks Herald has given notice to the city that it plans to leave its current location downtown to move to a south-end business space.
City Administrator Todd Feland said he and Mayor Brandon Bochenski spoke with Herald Publisher Korrie Wenzel earlier this year and concurred that the Herald could end its lease early. The original lease agreement was for five years, to end in May 2024.
Wenzel said one reason for his interest in leaving the building is to find a space that’s a better fit for the Herald’s current number of staff, most of whom work remotely, and due to parking that has become limited with construction downtown.
“We’ve been working hybrid since the pandemic, but meanwhile there is a lot of construction downtown, and there’s a lot of things happening here that when we are in the office, we want to be able to have everybody park,” Wenzel said.
He said the Herald planned to move at the end of the lease period anyway. But when the city leaders said the Herald could leave early, “that was the genesis of it.”
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Feland asked for 60 days’ advance notice and Wenzel provided that notice last week. Feland said the Jobs Development Authority is expected to terminate the agreement with Forum Communications Co. — which owns the Herald — at its next JDA meeting, set for April 17.
The Herald has been in its downtown location for decades, rebuilding on the site after the Flood of 1997 and the fire that ensued. But as the Herald has downsized its staff, Forum Communications sold the building to the city in 2019.
The Herald has maintained office space there since, although Wenzel sent the staff to work remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the years since, the Herald has allowed most of its employees to continue to work from home, but managers and a handful of employees either work at the office full-time or work a hybrid schedule – a portion of hours at home and a portion in the office.
With the Herald moving out of the building, Feland said the city is looking for tenants that want office space downtown in the HIVE. Overall, the HIVE — also loosely referred to as the "Tech Accelerator" in recent years — supports companies, startups and entrepreneurs centered around the aerial and autonomous systems (UAS) industry, along with the data processing and imagery analysis that goes hand-in-hand with UAS.
While the first floor of the HIVE has space for startups within the UAS/tech industries, Feland said the Herald space will be open to more long-term tenants.
“It will allow us to move forward with permanent plans with other private-sector entities that are more in that UAS/tech sector to fill in that office space,” Feland said.
The lease structure for the space will be reconsidered for next year. The Herald pays $5,665 per month for 4,252 square feet of office space. Other tenants currently in the building include the Economic Development Corp. and Thread.
As the majority of the building has been refinished over the past year, Feland said the city is looking at retaining professional services to get concepts on how to update the Herald's space.
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“It would kind of match what the current building’s inner works are, but then we would work with the specific proposed tenants on how they would want it fit up at the same time,” he said.
Whether the current Herald space can accommodate more than one tenant is to be determined.
“I think that space will have more than one tenant, but we’ll have to see if we need to separate the various tenants or how that would work,” he said. “So that’s kind of a to-be-determined item.”
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