Seeking a lasting beauty
Mathis Winkler
NEWPORT BEACH -- It’s not that Councilwoman Norma Glover opposes
expanding City Hall.
What she doesn’t want to see, however, are trailer offices stuck here
and there to make room for Newport Beach’s employees. Glover said so
during a City Council study session this week while discussing ways to
deal with the crowding problem.
“When I first came on the City Council [in 1994], we had a beautiful
City Hall,” she said.
Then office partition walls, “which say immediately to people, ‘You
are not welcome here,”’ started to go up, Glover added. “I’d like to go
back to a beautiful City Hall. I’m absolutely opposed to mobile offices
down here. Why don’t we do something that’s nice?”
Mayor Gary Adams feels the same way. Temporary trailers, well maybe,
he said, prompting Councilman Gary Proctor to jump in by saying that
temporary buildings seemed to end up as the most permanent ones.
“This is a public building that needs to endure for a long time,”
Adams said, adding that city officials should consult with an architect
to come up with a better plan. “If we need to make changes, we need to
make them right.”
While council members pretty much rejected Don Webb’s last
recommendations as the city’s public works director, Webb said he was
pleased city leaders wanted to do something bigger than the temporary
buildings he’d proposed.
Touring City Hall buildings on Wednesday, the day he retired, Webb
pointed out crammed conditions in several of them.
“Everything’s just kind of been Band-Aided together,” he said, adding
that the 1984 building that houses the Public Works, Planning and
Building departments was the last major construction on the property.
Since then, city officials have squeezed extra office space out of
hallways and corners, set up desks for interns in filing rooms and cut
vaults in half to create new offices.
“We try to do everything we can do to expand what we have,” Webb said.
“But we’re running out of options. [City Hall’s] not made out of rubber.”
An increase in the number of employees isn’t really the reason for the
crunch, Webb said.
Rather, “we have a level of activity that we’ve never had in the
past,” he said, adding that residents come in with more requests for
building permits, planning checks or other city services.
And “when you have people performing in job spaces that are tiny, they
are not efficient,” he said. “We’ve gotten to the point where we need to
look at something to give us more space to do a good job.”
Webb said he realized mobile offices on City Hall lawns might not have
much of a chance to get council approval. But city leaders should
consider at least demolishing the old, windowless women’s jail, which is
tucked behind City Hall on 32nd Street, and replace it with mobile
offices, he said.
“It already looks like a mobile unit in my opinion,” Webb said, adding
that the $34,000 project could create some extra office space for now.
Council members have set aside about $345,000 in the current budget to
deal with the space problem at City Hall. They’ll talk more about
expansion alternatives at their next meeting, July 24.
NEEDING MORE SPACE
Here’s a list of city departments that are hoping to get extra room
(numbers are in square feet):
Community Services
* Administration 150
* Recreation 300
Administrative Services
* Payroll/Accounting 350
* Revenue 350
* Cashiers 250
* Administration 250
* Computer services 40
Human Resources 150 (also need conference room)
Public Works
* Engineering 300
* Administration 100
* Transportation and Development 300
Planning 300
Building 1,000
Fire
* Administration 500
TOTAL 4,340
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