Owen Sound City council will consider three different options to upgrade city hall at tonight's meeting.
A recent Building Condition Assessment outlined a dozen deficiencies with the 51-year-old facility.
Those include minimal insulation, required exterior repairs, a leaking basement, interior temperature extremes, incomplete fire separations, accessibility, and problem plagued heating, plumbing and air conditioning systems.
Last summer, council supported plans to renovate the facility, and an Architect was asked to develop concepts.
Kongats Architects has created three options.
Option A would accommodate current staff in a 20,735 sq/ft facility with an expanded west entry and scenic community rooms.
Option B, a 24,673 sq/ft plan would accommodate engineering and current staff, with a third flood addition, an expanded west entry and a basement excavation for archives, storage and printing.
And Option C is a 24,651 sq/ft plan without the basement excavation.
The city's project team recommends Option B, which would cost $8.3 million, and create a total annual debt payment of $370,000.
If the city redirects current debt payments to a future debenture fund when they mature, they could debenture over $9.2 million by the year 2020, or take on an annual debt payment of $550,000 without increasing the tax levy.
Some may question why not only replace the failing plumbing, heating and air conditioning systems. The estimates for that work alone during complete renovation is between $2,500,000 and $3,000,000. That would ignore the two building assessments that detailed the many other deficiencies that will continue to erode the useful life of the building. The estimated cost to build new would be + $12,000,000.
