STANWOOD — The ongoing remodel of Stanwood City Hall has turned up old furniture, office supplies and miscellaneous tools the city no longer needs.
A public surplus sale is scheduled from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday at Ovenell Park, 10520 Saratoga Drive, to get rid of hundreds of city-owned items. It’s a massive summer cleaning, city administrator Deborah Knight said. Stanwood has not hosted a large outdoor surplus sale like this before, she said.
The inventory includes desks, chairs, computer monitors, printers and small office supplies. There also are larger items, including a dishwasher, refrigerator, washer and dryer. Some pieces of Stanwood history can be found, too, including a wooden template used as a model for downtown directional signs.
Other merchandise is more random. There’s an abundance of pagers, outdated cellphones and squeegees. Also on the list are Polaroid cameras, a bullhorn, cassette recorders and players, a mounted radar gun and an Intoximeter alcohol detector.
A number of items are listed on the inventory as “broken,” but most are simply surplus: they’re outdated, have been in storage or recently were replaced. The sale is cash-only and buyers must take their purchase as is.
Money from the sale goes into the city’s general fund, Knight said. The main goal isn’t to turn a profit, it’s to clear out unneeded items without throwing away things that could be useful to other people, she said.
The sale comes at the tail end of the $192,000 remodel of Stanwood City Hall. Work started in January and would have been done by now if not for a month-long delay to deal with asbestos in the ceiling. Most of the project is done, with finishing touches wrapping up this summer.
The front office has been renovated and opened up into a larger and more maneuverable space, Knight said. Contractors built a bigger office for the previously cramped Community Development Department. Other work included refinishing floors and repainting walls. An open house is planned in the fall, likely September or October, so people can see the changes.
Built in 1939, the Stanwood City Hall building also has served as a police station, jail, community center and performance venue. Over the years, the jail cells and stage became storage space. Though the exterior of the building has been updated some in the last decade, the most recent major overhaul was in the 1960s.
City officials considered more extensive improvements to the building, but federal floodplain requirements cap how much money — no more than half the building’s value — can be spent on an upgrade before the whole structure needs to be elevated or otherwise flood-proofed. That likely would cost the city more than the actual remodel, according to city documents.
The Stanwood Police Department also was updated recently. Workers framed in new offices, installed new heating ducts in the ceiling, lowered the ceiling, relocated computer servers, rewired, painted, carpeted and set up new workstations, according to the city’s website. The police station project started in December and wrapped up in late March.
Kari Bray: 425-339-3439; kbray@heraldnet.com.
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