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