MUKILTEO – The dormant city hall issue is about to reawaken.
The City Council will discuss if and where to build a new city hall at its meeting today.
“It’s time to get it off the back burner and get it on the front where it belongs,” said City Council president John Sullivan, who along with Mayor Don Doran wanted the issue put on the agenda.
The issue is controversial because the only plan actually on the books involves tearing down the Rosehill Community Center at 304 Lincoln Ave. and building a new city hall and community center on the site.
The Friends of the Rosehill Community Center oppose tearing down the 77-year-old former school.
“Our group opposes anything that takes away park land,” group president Kathy Wisbeck said.
The plan still would allow for outdoor recreation on the site, Doran said. But Wisbeck said her group is hoping to organize a show of force at today’s meeting.
The meeting takes place at 7 p.m. at City Hall, 4480 Chennault Beach Road.
The current City Hall is a rented building the city has used since the early 1990s when it moved out of the Rosehill center, city administrator Rich Leahy said.
“It’s an old industrial park with metal buildings,” he said. The city pays about $160,000 per year in rent, Leahy said. The location was intended to be an interim solution until a new city hall could be built, he said.
In 1997, the City Council selected the Rosehill site for the new building. In 1999 and 2001, a site plan and design study were approved for the $12 million plan. Currently, the city is about $3.5 million short of having the money, Leahy said.
Earlier this year the city began to consider the idea of purchasing a site next to the city’s police station at 10500 47th Place W., off Kamiak Road near the YMCA. That site, owned by the state, is larger, but city officials don’t know how much it would cost, and building there could be complicated by tightening wetland regulations, they said.
Sullivan favors going ahead with the original plan. It can be done more quickly, and there are fewer uncertainties, he said. Also, it costs the city money to maintain the aging Rosehill center, he said.
Doran said the Rosehill site would allow the city hall to be expanded later, if necessary, and would help pump money into the fragile Old Town economy. He added that Old Town residents acceded to city hall leaving the area only on the premise that it would return someday.
But Wisbeck said that in a citywide survey taken in July 2002, 59 percent of the 496 Mukilteo residents who responded opposed tearing down Rosehill for the new complex.
Putting city hall on 47th Avenue W. would create a central civic campus with the police station and a fire station nearby, and would be more centrally located in the city, she said.
Doran said he hopes to have the issue resolved in the first quarter of next year.
Reporter Bill Sheets: 425-339-3439 or sheets@heraldnet.com.
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