Moving City Hall Out of Downtown Considered : Oxnard: Some council members said merchants and residents would feel abandoned as a result of the temporary change.

Oxnard officials, departing from existing plans for a new city hall, are considering consolidating city offices into the vacant Chevron Building on Gonzales Road and Rice Avenue.

City Manager Vernon Hazen said Wednesday that converting the remote 115,000-square-foot building on the city’s outskirts into a new city hall is one of several options under consideration.

“Leaving downtown would be the real critical issue,” Hazen said. “I don’t think we should unless we get a deal we can’t refuse, and only then on the condition that we return downtown.”

Hazen recently floated the idea to council members, some of whom said such a move would rightfully generate outrage from downtown merchants and residents that the city is abandoning the area, even if only temporarily. Councilwoman Dorothy Maron said she might support the relocation only if council meetings continue to be held at City Hall to ensure public access.

“I don’t think it’s the intention of any council member to move City Hall out of downtown permanently,” Mayor Nao Takasugi said.

Under the city’s existing master plan, a new city hall would be built in two phases on the site of the Oxnard Library, which is scheduled to move to a new building next year. The first phase would involve tearing down the old library within five years and building a 56,000-square-foot city hall that would later be expanded to more than 100,000 square feet and house all city offices.

Hazen said a second option would be to build a new city hall on an A Street site owned by the Oxnard Redevelopment Agency.

Construction of a new city hall, along with a move into the Chevron Building, would be contingent on finding buyers or tenants for the city’s present offices scattered about downtown, Hazen said.

County Supervisor John K. Flynn and Chief Administrative Officer Richard Wittenberg toured several city buildings Wednesday morning as possible sites for county offices. The county could be a prospective tenant because it has outgrown its Vanguard Drive office, which houses branches of the welfare, probation, mental health, veterans and agriculture departments.

The Chevron Building, designed to house 250 employees of the company’s offshore oil division, cost $18 million to build. In November, 1989, six months after groundbreaking, declining business prospects prompted Chevron to put the three-story building up for sale. The asking price is $15 million.

Bill Kiefer, the real estate broker handling the property, said Hazen toured the 7.6-acre site earlier this year at his invitation, as did the heads of several county departments. Kiefer said there have been no negotiations with the city, which he said is not included on his present prospective buyer list.