Eugene weekly., April 07, 2011, Page 12, Image 12

R EM O D EL D ES I G N B Y KAT E L A UE
RIP
OUT
S
ay you own a house that’s
50 years old and complete-
ly paid off but needs a new
heater, windows and paint
and could possibly fall down
in a rare huge earthquake.
Do you tear it down during a deep re-
cession and then pay to rent somewhere
else for years while you wait and see
if you can ever afford to rebuild some-
thing in the pit?
That, critics say, is in effect what the
city of Eugene apparently wants to do
with City Hall.
“We’re asking you today to give direction to move
forward on emptying out City Hall, and to begin to tear it
down,” Eugene facilities manager Mike Penwell told the
City Council before they voted 6-1 on the staff suggested
motion last month.
Eugene City Manager Jon Ruiz, who sat next to
Penwell at the March 16 meeting, called the vote a major
policy choice and didn’t object to Penwell’s “tear it down”
description of the council action. But afterwards, Ruiz
emailed the council to “clarify” that the council didn’t
actually vote to tear City Hall down.
“This morning’s Register-Guard reported that you made
a decision to demolish the existing City Hall in preparation
for phasing the construction of a new City Hall,” Ruiz
wrote. “To clarify, the motion you passed was to develop
and implement a transition plan for moving all remaining
city services out of City Hall and develop a phased approach
to building a new City Hall at the current site. Although the
council has discussed and commented on the pros and cons
of full or partial demolition or renovation of the existing
City Hall, a decision has not been made. That decision will
be made in the next many months.”
12 APRIL 7, 2011
EUGENE WEEKLY
Will the city
tear down City Hall
and leave a pit?
BY ALAN PI TTMAN
The offi cial resolution text that the council passed
didn’t mention tearing down City Hall, and Ruiz had sent
an email to the council earlier describing the next day’s
meeting as including “renovation or replacement of City
Hall.”
Opaque government aside, Eugene City Councilor Betty
Taylor, who missed the vote because she was at a National
League of Cities meeting, said city staff decided years ago
to tear down the building. Taylor said a city manager told
her 15 years ago that managers had already decided to
move out and demolish. “There’s been this determination,
this fi xed goal of tearing it down.”
Local architect Otto Poticha said he tried and failed to
get the city staff to fully present options to the council for
renovating City Hall. But he said he was “blown off” when
trying to present student work (see images) from a UO
architecture class he taught. “I was furious.”
Poticha and other critics argue that an extensive remodel
and addition to City Hall could be far cheaper, greener,
functional, safer and more attractive than tearing the seat
of government down and replacing it with an ugly pit.
Taylor agrees. “We should remodel,” she said.
So does local architect Jerry Diethelm. “There’s
certainly a lot of value there,” Diethelm said of remodeling
the 1964 City Hall building. “It’s more affordable and
buildable in phases in a way that will be an asset for the
community.”
Kevin Matthews, editor of ArchitectureWeek and
Friends of Eugene president, also opposes tearing down
City Hall. “Throwing away a functional building shell is
pure waste,” he wrote in an email to the council.
CHEAPER
“Fully renovating this building is a thirty to fi fty-
million dollar proposition,” Penwell told the city council,
explaining the building needs a new envelope and half-
million dollars for a new heating system. “Once you start
you really have to go pretty far down that path to keep this
building moving forward.”
But Poticha estimates that a remodel plus added fl oors
would cost about $30 million, or only $20 million with
grant funding.
Matthews said the city could take advantage of grants
available for remodeling and improving the energy
effi ciency of old buildings.
Poticha estimates that not throwing away the frame of
the building in a remodel would save about $10 million
compared to building a new building of the same size.
“It can’t help but be cheaper,” Taylor said. “I don’t
believe it’s cheaper to build a whole new building than to
remodel.”
The city has already wasted $3 million on designing a
$188 million new City Hall building. The city backed down
from the project after surveys showed the pricey design
inspired only 40 percent voter support.
To avoid a vote, the city did move to spend $16 million
in reserves on moving the police out of the struggling
downtown to a building across from the Eugene Country
Club golf course in north Eugene. A new police station
bond had already failed three times at the polls. The city
reserves, about $10 million of which are left, were created
by reducing services to citizens.
SEISMIC
City offi cials have long argued that City Hall needs
to be replaced because it could fall down in a rare huge
earthquake.
“I have an extra sensitivity to that given what we’ve
seen happen,” said Mayor Kitty Piercy, referring to the
recent Japan earthquake.
But Poticha said, “The whole business about this
building is going to come down around their knees is not
actually accurate.” Poticha said he reviewed the city’s 2009
seismic analysis and talked to the consultant. “It (City Hall)
is probably as safe if not safer than many of the buildings
in the community built within the past ten or fi fteen years,”
he said.
Although city offi cials have shown great concern
about the seismic risk to their offi ce building, they have
shown little visible concern about schools and other
structures at greater risk. In China, government offi cials
in sturdy buildings are now facing strong criticism for
not providing safe buildings to schoolchildren who died
in an earthquake.
Poticha says the city estimated that a seismic retrofi t
of City Hall could cost about $6 million. He estimates that
retrofi tting the building as part of a remodel that added
offi ces to a fi rst fl oor where the city has a parking garage
could reduce the cost to about $2.8 to $3.5 million.
The city has a surplus of thousands of parking spaces in
nearby garages and surface lots downtown.
Poticha says if the city wanted more parking, it could
partner with the county and state to add fl oors to the
subsurface county garage a block away.
Poticha said with the police moving out anyway,
phasing of the remodel could be done in the empty half
of the building with minimal disruption, saving millions
in offi ce rental and moving costs. The north side of the
building was designed to accommodate additional fl oors
and the parking level is at ground level on the north side
and could include daylight offi ces, according to Poticha.
GREENER
“I can’t believe it’s not better to recycle and reuse than
to destroy and rebuild,” said Taylor of calls to tear down the
old City Hall and build a new one. She called discarding the
building part of the mentality of a “throw-away society.”
The city has a policy calling for green building and many
offi cials and citizens have called for an energy effi cient
new City Hall. But Matthews wrote, “One simply cannot
start a seriously green building project with a gratuitous
teardown.” He said, “it is absolutely true, in many ways,
that reuse is the best and overwhelmingly green option.”
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