Theater and $5M Municipal Center to Replace City Hall?
City leaders wrestled with how to pay for a future, more spacious municipal center, estimated at $5.1 million, during a commission workshop Jan. 15. They discussed possibly selling city-owned land and using City Hall as performance art space.
The city's longtime dream of a municipal center is beginning to take shape. And it could mean a creative new use for City Hall. "There's some exciting possibilities," City Manger Rob DiSpirito said during a Jan. 15 city commission workshop. With no other viable funding options available, the $5.1 million price tag to make it all reality left DiSpirito thinking "outside the box" on how to pay for it. Tentative plans are to combine City Hall and the municipal services building, which houses the city clerk's office, utility billing and the human resources and finance departments, in a yet-to-be designed, 19,000-square-foot, two-story annex at the former site of the First Baptist Church, which has been used as a city-owned parking lot off of …
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Jerry Wayne
1:19 pm on Tuesday, January 22, 2013
That money could go to other things, like renewable energy resources for the city. Improvements to neighborhoods or organic garden patches, in-town hybrid transportation, ect. We need to start thinking long-term advancements to better the city, not a "pretty new building downtown". Dunedin could be a trendsetter to other cities to start cleaning up city pollution and start trying to reverse … more ›