Mayor Bateman Handed a Huge Defeat by City Council
Posted on Tue, Sep. 25, 2012
Homestead To Build New City Hall
By Christina Veiga
The Miami Herald
It took the discovery of cancer-causing radon gas, pervasive mold and asbestos in Homestead City Hall, but City Council members on Monday agreed to abandon the sick building and put up a new City Hall.
In the meantime, city employees in the building will move to temporary offices, council members decided.
“That is the right thing to do. We can’t have employees in here, breathing in radon, breathing in mold,” City Manager George Gretsas told council members.
Council members decided it wasn’t worth pouring money into the old building to fix it. Experts contacted by city staff estimated it would take $2 million and one year to fix all the health and environmental problems found.
Homestead officials have suspected for years that City Hall was “sick.” The city this year ordered an environmental review that confirmed their suspicions.
How much the temporary relocation will cost is still up in the air: Gretsas didn’t want to talk dollars and cents Monday, saying it might get in the way of lease negotiations. The city is looking for 10,000 square feet of temporary space for 38 employees.
Monday’s decisions are only the latest in a City Hall saga that goes back to at least 1998, when the city floated the idea of selling the land the building now sits on. Homestead City Hall is on a prime piece of real estate: a busy corner of U.S. 1 and Campbell Drive. Back in the late 1990s, then-mayor Steve Shiver thought Homestead could fetch a pretty penny by selling the 18-acre site.
The city’s most recent appraisal, in 2010, estimated Homestead could sell the City Hall site for $8.5 million.
Calls to relocate City Hall grew through the years, as the city’s population swelled and office space became cramped. Homestead’s current City Hall was built in 1959, when the city’s population was 9,000, Gretsas said. Homestead is now home to more than 60,000 residents, and city staff are spread out in buildings across Homestead.
“I can’t think of how many times I’ve been over here for a meeting and I had to wait for someone to drive from another building across town,” said Councilman Stephen Shelley. “It’s an inefficient way to do government, and that’s just with my meetings. I can’t imagine what staff has to go through.”
Plans to finally move ahead with a new building gained momentum in the 2000s, when the city bought land in downtown Homestead to put up the new City Hall, plans were drawn and the project was bid out.
It all came to a screeching halt in late 2009, when, after already sinking more than $6 million into the project, a new council decided it was too expensive to build as the city was being walloped by the foreclosure crisis and plummeting property values.
Among the most out-spoken critics of the project was current Mayor Steve Bateman. He still didn’t support the project even after all the health and environmental issues were recently found, and has been adamant that cleanup could be simple and inexpensive. He was absent for Monday’s decision and didn’t return calls for comment.
The rest of the council — including Jimmie L. Williams III, who voted by phone but wasn’t at the meeting — decided unanimously to once again move forward with building a new City Hall.
They also decided to keep a planned site in struggling downtown Homestead. The hope is that the new building will bring life to the area’s businesses.
“I feel this building is on life support, and it doesn’t make sense to me to spend $2 million to resuscitate it,” said Councilwoman Patricia Fairclough-McCormick. “What needs to be resuscitated is downtown.”
With that, the packed audience burst into applause.
“It would help to bring about a more vibrant community in downtown,” the councilwoman added.
“Let’s build City Hall downtown.”
Now, city officials have to decide whether to dust off the old plans that were drawn up for the project, or to ask for new plans — which would cost more money. A meeting to deal with that issue has been set for 6 p.m. Oct. 3 at City Hall, 790 N. Homestead Blvd.
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Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/09/25/v-print/3020450/homestead-to-build-new-city-hall.html#storylink=cpy
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