City Hall Looking Further Into Selling Out (17. April 2006, 07:18 by Derek Young) ~ Is It A Need?
This story’s a day or two old, but I was busy this weekend.
The city continues to look at whether to sell the circa 1929 art deco municipal building and move ‘city hall’ to South 21st and Jefferson. The goal of the sale would be to lower the cost per person and per square foot of running city without raising taxes. According to the story, preliminary numbers are in favor of selling the building and moving.
What concerns me is the focus on the building, its value, and the cost per person to run city hall. Why? One, because the city will always have a building and land with value. If we want to go by the numbers, wouldn’t it be cheaper to move even further south into a neighborhood that could use some love. Why stay in downtown at all? Second, generating numbers like this is a highly tenuous endeavor using smoke and mirrors. How do you consider what’s in and out of scope for the numbers. Do you count only the hard numbers like building cost, utilities, and cubicle walls. Or do you consider the soft costs like the loss of productivity caused by the move? Generally speaking, consultants hired to come up with such numbers will use whatever you want, to come up with the numbers you need. It’s in their best interest to find what you want to find.
I will acknowledge that, generally speaking, moving City Hall further south in downtown doesn’t bother me… too much. However, I like that our city’s government offices are right downtown in what could become a very vibrant part of our city. I like that it’s a building with a history and that we, the average public citizen, can walk in to do business. I often walk downtown to the municipal building to do my city business and enjoy every bit of it. If the building goes condo or commercial condo, we won’t be quite as welcome anymore. Moving to South 21st Street isn’t a huge difference, but it’s enough that I won’t be walking it – at least for a while.
Link to The News Tribune
Commenting Is Closed
Comments are allowed for two weeks from the posted date. If you want to make a comment or reopen this discussion, please contact us with your request. Thank you for visiting.
I can just see the city taking up all of that valuable downtown land off of 21st and filling with the 4-5 story buildings Tacoma loves. Don’t build a campus.. Build a Village! It would be such a waste if they just put city hall there and no commercial/retail and residential.
1 | Posted by Jake | Apr 17, 12:40 PM
Jane Jacobs had a point when she said that you need diversity in primary uses in order to see an area thrive. Right now St. Helens has City Hall as its primary anchor and it seems like the Merlino Arts Center as its secondary anchor. From an urban planning perspective we need to ask the question, “What would this area be like without City Hall?†That’s a major civic use, which draws in people from all over the City. If we replace that with condos, we lose that primary use. I’m thinking that it might work if we replaced some of the buildings on the other side of Baker St. on the opposite side of the Triangle – put in a grocery store and some other major use.
We need to see large public institutions as urban chess pieces. You don’t situate too many of them close together, because their effects on helping to rebuild an urban environment are not very cumulative.
It’s not a bad idea to rehabilitate all of those old warehouses, but a city hall may not be the most appropriate use.
2 | Posted by Chris | Apr 18, 10:05 AM
Commenting is closed for this article.
