"Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda:" Better Plans for a New City Hall

What if city hall gets torn down (or abandoned) despite the will of the people?

This proposal has two alternative views of the new city hall as seen from West Ocean Drive, one with the (soon-to-be-required) standing seam steel roof and one with the traditional tile roof. There is a floorplan showing all the necessary interior spaces. It meets the anticipated flood zone requirements.

The design meets all the design criteria and is "harmonious." That's the good news.

If the voters opt to raze the existing building, this is a decent alternative. It looks the part and fits all the staff. It can be built for a realistic $5 million but the necessary financing and likely overruns will take it over $7 million. That's the bad news.

Couda, shoulda, woulda. If the city commission had done this in 2018 instead of going for gun towers and the shopping mall, it would have cost just $2.5 million and we would still have all the $1.5 million they've spent engineering a fraud and renting trailers that we could use for the overruns and even some fluff. That's the worse news, although it pretty much seals their political fate.

This plan assumes a "clean sheet" redesign of city hall. Here are the design criteria:

• Meet the City requirement that the "architectural style and building materials" of new construction "are harmonious in character."
• Meet or exceed AE-9 flood zone elevation requirements.
• Meet the space requirements listed by employees, residents, and the police department.
• Meet the needs for secure records storage and on-site utilities.
• Keep all spaces on a single floor.
• Maintain the approximate footprint of the original building (this building layout is a few feet shorter and wider which offers a little more attic "expansion" space under the same roof pitch).
• Maintain a similar appearance to the original building with "stacked bond" CBS construction.
• Concentrate plumbing and other services.
• Offer offices with windows for the current staff.
• Enlarge the P.D./EOCspace.
• Provide separate wasroom and locker space for P.D.
• Create two flexible "conference room" spaces, combinable into one "commission room."
• Locate the kitchen suitably for office staff and P.D. as well as full access for Marble Hall.
• Maintain or expand existing post office space.

This design is a reasonably efficient use of space although it does lose 8% to hallways because staff is no longer allowed to climb over each other's desks.

Worth noting is the simple fact that six years of delay have nearly doubled construction costs.

In today's inflated economy, this project is now likely to cost more than $5 million but less than $8 million when it's all said and done. (That's still as much as $9 million "cheaper" than the building the City put out for bids.) The right answer is to develop new plans and request legitimate bids for each alternative.