For more than half a decade, a large part of a 63-year-old office building has been sitting half vacant in downtown Fort Myers, a relic from when it first opened as the Inter-County Telephone & Telegraph Company in 1961.
That will change in 2025, when Lee County Property Appraiser Matt Caldwell and his team of about 90 employees move into the first, fourth and fifth levels of the building at 1520 Lee St., which also has a mezzanine.
Lumen, which bought CenturyLink in 2020, owns the property under Embarq Florida LLC. Although the property has changed hands via various business transactions, it officially has had continuous ownership since 1974, when the building sold for $95,000, property records show.
Building a 31,000-square-foot office building at the going rate of $300 to $400 per square foot would have cost taxpayers between $9.3 and $12.4 million. The potential price prompted Caldwell to work with broker Adam Palmer of LQ Commercial in signing a lease.
“It’s the largest lease in downtown Fort Myers in at least 20 years,” Palmer said.
By state law, a government entity cannot sign a lease longer than five years. The property appraiser’s office signed a five-year lease with the option for at least three additional five-year extensions at $12 per square foot, or about $372,000, plus $2 million to $3 million in renovation costs.
Although the building didn’t go up until the 1960s, the property is one of the first plotted in the city, as it belonged to the Hendry family, which played a role in the founding of Lee County in 1877.
Furniture salesman Robert Foxworthy married into the Hendry family and had ownership of the property when he sold it to the telephone and telegraph company in 1964. Foxworthy died in 2011 at 89. According to his obituary, he sang at age 15 in 1937 at a party on behalf of Nina Edison, the late Thomas Edison’s widow.
Now the property has moved into its next chapter. The Greater Fort Myers Chamber of Commerce also leases part of the space.
“It’s a significant move,” Palmer said of Caldwell and his team leasing the space. “This was a marathon for sure. We’ve been talking about it for over a year. But I’ve been working on the project for closer to 20 years.
“I’ve been associated with that project when it was originally the Sprint building. Then the CenturyLink building, and then Lumen.”
Lumen will retain control of the second and third floors. Some of that space remains full of technological equipment.
“It’s been occupied with equipment but empty with people,” Palmer said.
The property appraiser’s offices have, since 1992, been at the Constitutional Building at 2480 Thomas St. in Fort Myers, often nicknamed the Darth Vader building because of its dark façade. That building also houses the Lee County Tax Collector’s office and Lee County Elections office, which are also growing and could use additional space.
“It reached a point where one of the departments needed to be relocated,” Palmer said.
The Constitutional Building isn’t obsolete, Caldwell said. It just became too small.
“That building was built in ’92, when [the county had] only 400,000 people,” Caldwell said. “Now we’re 800,000 people going over a million. We just don’t have enough room to serve the public anymore, all three of us.”
Caldwell called the lease agreement a win for the taxpayers.
“We’ll do some shine and polish on the fourth and fifth floors,” he said. “The lower floor is going to be a complete remodel. That’s going to take the better part of the year it looks like.”
Chris-Tel Construction has been hired to handle construction, Caldwell said.
“As we looked at our different options, the cost of building a brand new facility was really just an astronomical number,” Caldwell said. “In talking to the county and in talking to our peers, I concluded it would be best to look for an existing space. And the numbers lined up really well for us here.”
