Juneau may be getting a new City Hall after all – but this time voters won’t get to decide on whether to approve it.
At a Sept. 8 committee of the whole meeting, the Juneau Assembly moved forward with a plan to purchase and renovate two floors of the Michael J. Burns building, which houses the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation downtown.
If approved by the Assembly at its next regular meeting later this month, it would become the new location for City Hall. The cost to purchase the floors is $10.2 million. Renovation costs could add more than $7.5 million.
At the meeting, City Manager Katie Koester told members the city estimates the move and renovations will be cheaper in the long run than maintaining the city’s current status quo.
“Purchasing two floors of a box outside of the downtown core is not my dream situation. It’s not my legacy. It’s not anything like that,” she said. “I just think that it’s a very practical, fiscally responsible thing to do.”
The current City Hall near Marine Park fits less than half of the city’s employees and needs millions of dollars in maintenance and repairs. The city rents other office space around town to house the rest of its staff. But city administrators say that’s unsustainable and expensive. They have advocated for years for a new space that would fit everyone.
The city asked voters twice during recent municipal elections to approve bond debt to help pay for the construction of a brand new City Hall building. Voters said no both times.
Now, the city has enough money set aside to purchase the floors in the Burns building, which means it won’t need to ask voters to approve any bond debt. The decision will instead go to the Assembly.
Assembly member Alicia Hughes-Skandijs said she doesn’t like the plan, but she won’t object to it.
“I share some people’s sense of, This isn’t what I wanted,’ but we do owe it to our community and to the folks who work for the city and for the community to come up with a solution,” she said.
The Assembly asked for a more detailed estimate of what the renovations would cost. The Assembly is slated to take public testimony on the purchase of the floors and vote on it at its next regular meeting on Monday, Sept. 22.
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