Renovating City Hall

(Video 2:50)
Images courtesy of L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library and Chippewa Valley Museum.

You may have noticed parts of Farwell Street being closed off in front of Eau Claire City Hall recently. This is because the city hall is about to undergo one of its largest reconstruction projects ever.
Rodney Bonesteel, Building Services Supervisor, took us on a tour of the buildings that make up Eau Claire City Hall. He shared some of their history as well as what the city is hoping to accomplish with this project.

The whole project is to take about one year, with employees being moved out in July and construction starting in September of 2018 with significant completion done by June of 2019.

“Originaly the south building was the public library, it was funded by Carnegie money, it was built in 1903. Later in 1916 the north building was built as City Hall. It was also funded by Carnegie money, so both of them ended up being nationally historically registered places. We have evolved over time, the new public library building was built across Eau Claire street. And then the City Hall annexed the former library, then in 1979, ’78 the link building was built to join the two buildings, so that people could pass through and conduct business easier.

It’s been almost 40 years since the place has been significantly remodelled. There’s been small remodelling projects throughout the facility, over the course of the 40 years. But really we are in need of doing some significant upgrades.

In some areas, it is fairly cosmetic, but in other areas – we’ve been studying the work flows in the building, and how do we locate different divisions, work groups within the building so that they can work together better, and how does the public access the building and make that a bit more accessible. Looking at moving our primary contact up one floor, and have the public enter through a different entrance, add some ADA accessibility. In some areas, this means moving walls, changing the way things are designed. There is some fairly significant remodelling work to be done, its not as simple as carpet and paint and lights.

We’re looking at uncovering some of the historical aspects of the building, that were original to the building that would now be desirable to return to their former granduer if possible.

We originally thought we would do this is in a two to three year phase, with the north building or south building going first with the other building the following year, and then the middle building in the third year.
However, when we started looking at the cost of phasing it and then rebidding, and the escalation of cost over a three year period, we found out that it would be much more cost effective to move everyone out of the building and have a single phase, which actually shortened our time period to about one year.

Our timeline is to move people out to some location (2020 Prairie Lane, Eau Claire) in July, and then empty the building and its contents, then turn the buildings over and have construction start around September of this year (2018). Estimated timeline is that we may be significantly complete about a year later in June (2019).
With the fact that these are about 100 year old buildings, there might be some surprises yet that we haven’t found, it may be in about a year. We think realistically September (2018) to September (2019).”

The Commissions and Boards that meet at city hall, are working out where they will meet in the future.
City Council meetings will be taking place at the Eau Claire County building, sharing space with the Eau Claire County Board of Supervisors.

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