City Hall project still moving, slowly

They'll move, someday. photo by Jim Cornelius The City of Sisters is still planning to build a new city hall on land acquired last year from the school district (part of the former middle school site) on the east side of town.

The structure will probably have two stories, contain 8,000 to 9,000 square feet and cost about $1.25 million.

Those, at least, are the best guesses City Manager Eileen Stein can make today. When asked about the status of the project last week, she said the city hopes to get the building out to bid next spring and to break ground sometime in the summer. The building probably will take eight to 12 months to complete.

Although there have been some delays in getting the site plan pinned down, Stein said no delay has been caused by the failure of the former Multnomah Publishers office building on Adams Avenue to sell.

The city originally bought the Multnomah building with the idea of eventually converting it into a city hall. That plan died when city officials discovered that making the building accessible to meet requirements of the Americans With Disabilities Act would make the project uneconomical.

In 2003, the school district put its former middle school site on the market because the school was to be moved into the former high school building when a new high school opened that fall.

Leaders of the city and the Deschutes Public Library District decided they would like to use the site for the new buildings they were planning -- a new city hall and a new Sisters Library. They were able to reach agreement with the school district on a satisfactory price, $9 a square foot, for enough land to satisfy both.

Since the sale, the school board has been actively exploring the possibility of joining the other two entities by remodeling the original section of the former middle school that has been saved and converting it into the district's headquarters. Neither that building nor the land immediately surrounding it was part of the sale.

Meanwhile, the city has been trying to sell the former Multnomah building. The structure is advertised regularly by the listing agent, RE/MAX Town & Country Realty. The asking price started at $900,00 and is now down to $725,000.

But Stein says the city's ability to go ahead with a new city hall is not contingent upon the sale of the Multnomah building. The city has several options available for financing the new structure, none of which would involve a general obligation bond tied to new taxes. She said the city will not ask for additional taxes to pay for the building.

She did acknowledge that whenever the Multnomah building is sold, the net proceeds will be applied to the financing of the new city hall.

Part of the difficulty of producing a site plan has been caused by uncertainty over how a traffic couplet will be designed to ease congestion on Cascade Avenue.

Anticipating that the northern leg of the future couplet will cut off the northeast corner of the city's building site near Locust Street and Main Avenue, the city is buying 8,100 square feet of additional land from the library district to compensate. The library district has agreed to sell the 30-by-270-foot strip on the eastern edge of its parcel for the original purchase price, $9 a square foot or $72,900 total.

As for the new city hall's design, Stein said: "My thought originally was that we could accommodate all of our needs in a single-story city hall."

But the architects (Steele Associates of Bend) persuaded her that it would be more prudent to provide for future expansion by building two stories. It's easier to add to a two-story building than to add a second story to a one-story building. One other advantage is that a taller building will produce a smaller footprint, consuming less land.

Stein said that although the project's timing is uncertain, she knows that the library district is about ready to go to bid on the new library and she estimates that "we're probably about nine months behind the library."

She indicated no second thoughts about the basic three-agency "campus" concept.

"We have not received any...complaints from the public here about this whole site," she said. "All I get when I talk to people is 'That's great, that's wonderful, you've saved it from becoming a Safeway...'"