City Hall remodeled, Celina Record

Celina City Hall remodel provided much-needed upgrades Lisa Ferguson, lferguson@starlocalmedia.com Mar 11, 2016 The hammering has ceased and construction dust has been swept up at Celina City Hall, where earlier this week the final touches were put on a remodeling project of the building. A ribbon-cutting ceremony was held Tuesday, formally reintroducing the improved facility at 142 N. Ohio St. to the public. The remodeling work began late last year and was originally scheduled to take about six weeks to complete. “With a couple of hiccups here and there, it ended up being about eight weeks,” said Michael Montgomery, administrative services manager for Celina, who was tasked with overseeing the project that cost the city about $200,000 to complete. A conference room and additional offices were added, while security features and building operation systems were upgraded, among other improvements. The renovations were necessary, Montgomery said, to keep up with the growth that the city and its staff is experiencing. Since 2011, when the city government moved into the building that formerly housed a bank, it has more than doubled its number of employees from about 40 to more than 80. “Adding more usable office space allows our employees to be a lot more efficient” in their work, Montgomery said. At times during the remodeling process, City Hall resembled “a war zone,” he recalled. “It was really loud and there was a lot of dust.” Floors were ripped out, walls were built up and some city workers and offices were temporary relocated to other city-owned facilities including Celina’s historic former city hall building at 302 W. Walnut St., which is the permanent home of the Celina Economic Development Corp. and Main Street offices. “For those people that stayed in their offices, it was a little bit of an inconvenience for them, but they were extremely helpful and tolerant as we went through the process,” Montgomery said. Changes that will be most apparent to residents and others who visit City Hall occurred primarily in the lobby. A formerly open sitting area was walled off to create additional office space that is not accessible to the public. On the wall, a vintage wooden sign that for years adorned the façade of the Walnut Street building was hung. “It’s cool to keep that piece of history and preserve it,” Montgomery said. Also in the lobby, customer service counters for the city’s courts and utility departments were enclosed with glass to boost customer privacy as well as provide security for employees. “The counter heights are the same, but none of the windows were here and the walls didn’t go up to the ceiling,” Montgomery explained. “This provides a little bit more privacy.” Additionally, several secure glass doors were installed to prevent the public from accessing numerous city offices. The building’s interior spaces are now accessible only by employees who enter via a keycard-based system tied to their city-issued identification badges. “Now there’s just another layer of security,” Montgomery said. The addition of a small conference room in the lobby, which can seat up to 10 people, will help accommodate the growing number of meetings hosted by city staffers with commercial and residential developers and related professionals. “This is the space that we most needed,” Montgomery said, “because with all of the development and all of the meetings that are going on, there was always a war for the conference room. … We were just running out of meeting space.” Montgomery said he is pleased with the results of the remodeling efforts. “The thing that I have been telling staff members, especially as you walk down our main corridor, (the changes look) like it should have been this way the entire time,” he said. “I think it looks natural. It keeps up with the character of the building.” The sentiment is echoed by Celina City Manager Mike Foreman, who said the project brought City Hall “up to a more modern level in appearance. Before, it was a bank that we just kind of moved into and were using the space. Now we’ve created a space that really more typically looks like a city hall and feels like a city hall.” The project also “really helped expand City Hall as far as our ability to house our employees,” he said. “We didn’t have enough conference space … we needed more room for employees to be able to do their daily work” in a secure environment. “We kind of created a project that answered all three of our questions.” The paint on the walls has barely dried, yet city leaders are already looking toward beginning a second round of remodeling work. Phase Two, Montgomery said, will include building a corridor that will connect City Hall to a new wing of offices that is slated to be built in what is currently the Celina Senior Center, at 140 N. Ohio St. Construction of those offices, which will house the city’s engineering and planning and development staffs, is on indefinite hold until the senior center can be relocated. “They have a growing population, too, so we want to make sure that we’re able to accommodate their growth as well,” Montgomery said of the seniors who frequent the center. On April 1, the city will officially take possession of First United Methodist Church of Celina, 112 N. Colorado St., which it purchased several years ago. (The church’s congregation is set to relocate later this month to its newly constructed facility near Old Celina Park.) The city has hired an architecture firm to conduct a feasibility study on the Colorado Street building, which was constructed in the 1920s. Short-term plans are to continue to have the building serve as Celina’s city council chambers, which it has for the past year, and move some staffers into its basement-level offices following some light renovation work. Several years from now, the city plans to extensively remodel the church building which will allow it to permanently house the city council chambers as well as a performing arts center. Before that happens, the Celina Police Department plans to relocate its headquarters into the Kirk Hall facility located adjacent to the church building. Foreman said the current and future remodeling and renovation projects are intended to essentially hold the city government over for a decade or so until it is prepared to build a modern city hall complex, which will likely require the passage of a bond measure by residents in order to secure funding. “Our master plan would be to build a city hall that’s similar to what (larger) cities around us have built,” he said.