New $5 million city hall considered for North Bend

Published 4:47 pm Tuesday, August 30, 2016

A new city hall for North Bend is not a new idea, but the approach now being considered by the city council to get one built is definitely novel. Council members authorized an expenditure of $40,000 Aug. 16 to pay two architectural firms, TCA of Seattle, and Lawhead Architects of Bellevue, $20,000 each for their work on preliminary designs for a modern, but inexpensive, city hall located on city land near the current fire station.

“It’s unusual to do it this way,” said City Administrator Londi Lindell, referring to the architects’ essentially competing for the project, but she noted that it offers several advantages.

Saving on costs is one advantage — Lindell said both firms had estimated the same schematic design in a traditional request for proposal or RFP process, at $58,000 — and efficiency is another. When the designs are complete, something Lindell is hoping for by mid-October, the city will own those documents outright, and will be able to pick and choose elements from each design.

The most important benefit, as Lindell sees it, is speed. “I want something that actually gets built,” she said.

New facility needed

North Bend’s City Hall on Main Street, built in 1939, with additions in 1949, and the ’70s, is in a floodplain. The building’s seismic instability and other safety hazards were well documented in the 2010 bond campaign to build a new fire station, when the North Bend Fire Department was housed there. A new tenant, Piccola Cellars, leased a portion of the old fire station in 2014 and made needed safety improvements there in the past two years, as well as giving the entire exterior an update.

The city offices, though, are still cramped despite the staff being divided among buildings throughout the city, and still have sagging floors and exposed wiring “throughout all of city hall,” said Lindell. “It is a poor professional image.”

Image is one of the last reasons she’d recommend a new city hall, she said, “Yet we have citizens coming in to get permits and we expect them to be compliant with your international building codes.”

The building is past due for an update, Lindell told the council, but they knew that, and have for decades.

“This discussion actually started back in the early ’90s,” she said. In 1992, city leaders bought almost 10 acres of property between North Bend Way and Cedar Falls Way for city facilities. The “municipal campus,” which now includes the fire station and the city’s public works department, was also intended for a future city hall.

Dozens of work studies and open houses later, the city is still struggling with locating its main facility outside of the city center, and with how to pay for it.

Updating the existing building is not being considered. “Developers will tell you that remodeling always costs more than reconstruction,” said Lindell.

“So it was always going to be less expensive to find a property without a building on it.”

She then listed the many benefits of the municipal campus site, including the city’s debt-free ownership of the property, the opportunity to create a central building to house all city offices, the improved safety of the facilities and easy access to the site because of its location between North Bend Way and Cedar Falls Way.

Paying the bill

To the question of how to pay for a new city hall, the answer is less clear, because the cost is not clear yet.

“I don’t know if we can do it for $5 million, but that’s been our goal,” Lindell said.

The “scaled down” city hall would be, according to the council’s documentation on the project, 10,000 to 14,000 square feet, with 26 offices, one large and two smaller conference rooms, council chambers, and counter space for Public Works, Finance and Community and Economic Development Department staff.

Funding would come from a combination of fund balances, budget savings and revenue from property sales, Lindell said, not from a voter-approved bond.

“What we have right now is $1.1 million in REET (real estate excise tax, a one-time tax the city collects on all property sales) sitting in a savings account,” Lindell said, plus another $480,000 in a fund designated for a proposed city civic center.

Conservative budgeting will help the city end the year with a higher general fund balance, she said, and property sales could make up the balance. Properties that could be sold include the current 12,00 square foot City Hall site at 211 Main Ave. N., a property directly across Park Street from the Visitor Information Center, and the vacant lot on the corner of North Bend Way and Sydney Avenue N.

Piccola Cellars recently signed a five-year lease with the city for its portion of the City Hall building, but the lease should be unaffected by the sale, Lindell said.

Since the council authorized the architects, TCA, which designed the fire station, and Lawhead Architects, which designed the public works building, to create the designs, the next step will be reviewing them. Lindell hopes that the designs are ready for council review by mid-October.

“I am cautiously aggressive in my hope,” she said. “I would love to go out to bid this winter,” and break ground on the new North Bend City Hall in 2017.