City Council is once more honing in on answering the longstanding question of what to do about the deterioration of the Morton Civic Center, 2100 Ridge Ave., and the police/fire headquarters building, 1454 Elmwood Ave. and 909 Lake St., as consultants and staff reported Monday evening that public engagement shows residents prefer a “cost conscious” approach that seeks to minimize costs without compromising on core services.
Monday’s discussion came 11 months after the release of a relocation feasibility study report by consultant AECOMwhich identified six construction scenarios for both aging facilities, whether at separate locations or in a single integrated facility. City staff followed this with a series of listening sessions in October and November, plus an open online poll and a statistically valid phone survey, to collect input on what priorities residents have for any future city hall the city pursues.
Michael Blue of Teska Associatesthe firm that facilitated the listening sessions and online poll, presented findings from these efforts. He stressed that the engagement wasn’t focused on collecting opinions on what to do with the existing Civic Center, but rather more general input on how people use the current facility and what residents’ desired functions and priorities are for any future version, whether at 2100 Ridge or elsewhere.
“It did come up, people raised it at the listening sessions, people raised it in the comments,” Blue said. “But it was really not the focus of the effort, and it’s not meant to skirt the question, we just want to be sure we got to the other topics.”
Public wants ‘cost conscious’ approach
Across all three outreach methods, Blue said, residents gave a “clear tone of cost consciousness” when asked how much the city should invest in whichever option it pursues.
“Overall, the idea of balanced spending [is]: Let’s not have the cheapest version, let’s think in terms of investing for the future,” Blue said, “but let’s also look in terms of trying to balance cost and quality and amenities.”
When Council Member Tom Suffredin (6th Ward) later asked about the distinction between “being cost conscious and going with the cheapest option,” City Engineer Lara Biggs said the lowest-cost option would likely require cutting out nonessential but desired amenities.
By way of example, she said that leasing long-term at 909 Davis St. might be “the most cost-effective thing if you look at it [as] straight numbers,” but the site wouldn’t be able to accommodate early voting, which has been held at the current Civic Center since its inception in 2006.
“The answers we got were there are some things that are really important to the community, and they want to see those things move forward” to a future location, Biggs said. “So we should not necessarily pick the cheapest things if it means that the community can’t access the services they need, or can’t get the amenities that they want.”
Those services and amenities include both things inside the building, like public meeting spaces and vehicle services, as well as the accessibility of the building itself. In particular, free parking was the highest-ranked priority in a multiple-choice question in the online poll, and was the only one to receive votes from a majority of the respondents. The phone survey, which targeted 400 registered voters and was designed to more accurately reflect the city’s demographics, yielded largely consistent results as the other methods outside of a notably higher prioritization of providing free Wi-Fi.
At the same time, though, two-thirds of respondents in the online poll said they’d been to the Civic Center fewer than three times in the last six months, and 82% said they’d prefer to do city-related business online rather than in-person. Council Member Bobby Burns (5th Ward) said “that’s the conversation” to him, arguing that a shift to online services would be in line with the community’s expectation that the council “use city finances wisely across the board.”
“We have to think about a way to do more with less,” Burns said. “I think over time, through attrition, not laying anybody off, there are things that this city does that can be done more online.”
Renovation requires gut rehab
After Blue’s engagement presentation, Biggs stepped up to go over options available to the city, starting with renovation of the existing Civic Center, which she said “still remains on the table.” The building was built as a school in 1901 and became the city’s headquarters in 1979, and needs replacement or major repair to several critical systems, including HVAC and electrical.
A renovation is currently estimated to cost around $65 million, which would cover the aforementioned systems as well as other work needed to bring the building up to current building code standards and ADA accessibility requirements. Biggs said meeting these standards is mandated since the HVAC replacement alone would cost more than half the property’s valuation — “We cannot really do anything about those things,” she said.
The price also assumes the work would be a gut rehab of the entire building, including a reworking of the building’s layout to free up around 40% of square footage the city doesn’t need for its operations. In response to suggestions of a partial rehab to save money and space from public commenter John Kennedy and later from Council Member Clare Kelly (1st Ward), Biggs said the existing layout means nothing less than a gut rehab is viable.
“In the current configuration of this building … we struggle to find places to put people, because a lot of it is very inefficient in the way it’s laid out,” Biggs said. “You really have to do a massive overhaul of the building and really change a lot of stuff, like hallway widths, different things about how the rooms are laid out, to get to that place where that 40% is free.”
There is a spot of hope for bringing the city’s share of the cost down, however, as staff plan to investigate the use of federal historic tax credits to cover up to 20% of the total project cost. Biggs advised that the state’s tax credits are “pretty competitive” and likely can’t be relied upon to assist further, and that the federal credits can’t stack with others like energy tax credits for installing a geothermal heat pump system.
Relocation options in downtown
Beyond renovating the Civic Center, or rebuilding it or the police/fire headquarters at their current sites, there were four downtown relocation options presented to council members:
- Purchasing Northwestern University-owned properties at 1801 Maple Ave. and 906 University Place and converting them into a police/fire HQ;
- Investing in construction of the proposed 27-story high-rise apartment building at 900 Clark St. and then owning the first four or five floors for use as a city hall;
- Moving city hall functions in with the Evanston Public Library at 1703 Orrington Ave. and scaling the building’s needed renovations up to a full rehabilitation; and
- Extending the city’s lease at 909 Davis St. into the long term, thus renting space for city hall instead of owning it.
The two Northwestern properties are respectively used as a laboratory start-up incubator and a “shop” building with carpentry services, and it was identified in Biggs’ slideshow as the “most appropriate” option for a new police/fire building. She said the surface parking lot at 906 University would be “pretty valuable” for secure parking and rapid deployment, and the building at 1801 Maple would be ideal for holding many of the needed pieces for the city’s public safety operations.
“There’s a huge need for storage of evidence and equipment, there’s locker room requirements, you know, all of those things just take up a lot of space,” Biggs said. “That going into an existing laboratory building with big core spaces is actually pretty valuable, and it’s well-suited to the conversion.”
As for the city hall options, there was little discussion about 909 Davis or 900 Clark; on the latter, Council Member Jonathan Nieuwsma (4th Ward) said he’s “glad we are open to other ideas like that,” but balked at the estimated investment of $43 million for the city to own the first few floors of the building. “That doesn’t make sense at that price, given the other options on the table,” he said.
There was plenty of discussion about the library colocation option though, as Mayor Daniel Biss and Council Members Nieuwsma, Burns and Juan Geracaris (9th Ward) each indicated they were interested in learning more about it as the process continues. The library’s main branch already needs more than $18 million in renovations in its current form, but Biggs said library staff believe their operations could be performed in just half the space.
“Which is very similar to the space we need for city hall operations now,” Biggs said.
It wouldn’t be a one-to-one move-in though, as she described the library as having “wide open spaces” that would need to be remodeled into offices and other closed-off functions. Asked by Suffredin how this colocation would balance the needs of both operations, Biggs assured that there is “no intention of forcing the library to provide lesser services,” and said that while there would likely be some shared spaces for similar functions like meeting rooms, other functions would remain exclusive from each other.
“I think there are some economies of scale, but there are operations of spaces for computer labs, and study centers, and a teen hangout spot, and places where they offer social services,” Biggs said. “There’s not a huge overlap with our need for office spaces and et cetera. So there are some things that would be completely separate, but yes, I do think there would be shared [space].”
With Monday’s conversation complete, staff plan to obtain additional evaluations of the potential library and Northwestern property conversions, as well as investigate the aforementioned tax credits for renovating the current Civic Center. Biggs said this information will be brought back in January for a “substantive discussion of all of these options to understand how the City Council would like to move forward.”
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