Last Thursday's fourth public workshop on the new Homer City Hall and Town Square Project ended the schematic design phase for Homer's proposed civic project in the Town Center. The ideas presented last week moved ever closer to a final vision, but the next big step looks at what's on the minds of Homer residents voting March 25 to authorize bonds to pay for the project: money.
Photo provided
This view of the east side of the proposed new Homer City Hall shows the City Council Chambers and meeting area opening up on the Town Square. Architect Brian Meissner said he put the city logo on the east wall to suggest a possible location for art. The narrow column would be a clock tower.
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"This is the first point where we're going to figure out what this costs," said architect Brian Meissner of ECI/Hyer Architects, part of the team with Jay Brant General Contractors, Agnew::Beck and Corvus Design that's designing the building and associated plaza. The project has three parts:
* A 20,000-square-foot City Hall, with office space for up to 40 employees twice the current number and a 3,000-square-foot meeting hall and council chambers, to be built on city land;
* A Town Plaza at the east end of City Hall which the meeting hall opens up on;
* A Town Square, a 1-acre area to the west and north on Cook Inlet Region Inc. land that includes a "garden for all ages," an overlook and paths that would be built later or as the budget allows.
This week, as it finished the end of the schematic design phase of the process, the team started nailing down some real numbers. Under the general-contractor, construction-manager concept of building design, architects work with a general contractor Homer firm Jay Brant to create a plan. With contractors involved from the start, the idea is to develop a design that's not only architecturally distinct, but affordable and practical.
Earlier this month, the Homer City Council approved a preliminary budget of up to $11.8 million for the project, of which $8 million would come from bonds. The city had asked the design team to come up with that estimate so the council could decide on a debt authorization ordinance in advance of the March 25 special election.
In a memorandum to Mayor James Hornaday and the council, City Manager Walt Wrede said usually a project budget comes after the 35 percent plans the end of the schematic design are sent to the council.
Not included in the $11.8 million is the cost of building roads and utilities. The city and CIRI will share a proportionate cost of infrastructure based on frontage along Hazel Avenue. The city will trade land with CIRI to get the Town Square property or take on a larger share of the infrastructure. CIRI and the city are in negotiations right now, Wrede said.
"CIRI and the city together are going to pay for the infrastructure," Wrede said. "They're (CIRI) paying their way."
The design team is now putting the horse back in front of the cart, and will refine its numbers and deliver the 35 percent plans to the council on March 10. The current design phase establishes the general footprint, size and location of City Hall and an adjoining plaza.
This week, designers also start looking at another feature of the project: what artists and craftspeople have in mind for the building and plaza. Requests for proposals for the 1-percent for art portion of the project were due last Friday. With those ideas in hand, architects can now look at how to use art in the city hall and plaza or how to integrate art into building elements, as was done in the Homer Public Library.
Landscape architect Laura Minsky of Corvus Designs showed a new element of the project: how parking fits in with City Hall and the Town Plaza. A slide she showed of a plan already was outdated, with City Hall moved 20 feet closer to an east-west street.
That plan places the building and plaza in relation to an extension of Hazel Avenue the street behind Safeway that now connects to Poopdeck Street. Hazel Avenue would take a 90-degree turn at City Hall to slow down traffic, take another 90-degree and continue to Main Street. Parking lots are at the west side of the intersection, with diagonal, on-street parking along Hazel Avenue. As much vegetation as possible would be preserved around the city hall and parking lots.
The west parking lot of about 80 spaces leads into the office end of City Hall. Another parking lot northwest of City Hall toward Pioneer Avenue and connecting to Main Street below the Duncan House Diner will be built later. A long hallway what Meissner called an "interaction space" connects the west lot with the meeting hall. City offices are accessed off this hallway, and could be closed off after hours while still allowing the meeting hall to be used.
The new City Hall not only doubles office space, it triples the number of meeting rooms. There is a conference and map room off of the Planning Department where planners can meet with builders to discuss plats and another conference room near the city manager's office. The meeting hall has a library where council members can meet in private under the rare conditions allowed under Alaska's Open Meetings Act.
"The layout for each department is very functional for their needs," Meissner said.
People at the workshop asked questions about parking and access. The interaction space offers covered access from the west parking lot, with disabled parking spaces near that entrance. There also would be disabled parking on Hazel Avenue at the east end, toward the meeting hall.
One new Homer resident, Judy Nester, suggested making one of the lots large enough for recreational vehicles. She said that when she and her husband first came to Homer, they traveled in a mobile home and drove straight out to the Homer Spit. Giving RV drivers a place to park might keep people in downtown.
"It's to your benefit to find places for RVs to park," she said.
Another feature of the meeting hall is how it opens up onto the plaza. That end of the building would include a kitchen for catered events, and even a window accessible from the plaza. Large overhead glass doors would open up the meeting hall to the plaza. Other sliding doors could close off part of the meeting hall for smaller events.
"In the winter, it functions as a little vestibule," Meissner said of that smaller, closed off area.
The plaza could be used for concerts, poetry readings, plays, the Farmers' Market and other events even political rallies.
"If you talk about political theater and how that plays out, it's almost limitless," Meissner said of the space.
Other ideas presented included a clock tower on the east or plaza end. On slides of the clock tower or of the west entrance, Meissner sketched in the city's logo of a ship's wheel but only to suggest where art could go. Some people liked the idea of a clock tower, similar to clocks like Big Ben in London or at Grand Central Station in New York City and the idea of "I'll meet you at the clock at noon."
The city hall and plaza plan also carves out about a 100-square-foot corner where Hazel Avenue makes a turn. That could be sublet to a store or a caf the details haven't been worked out yet, Meissner said.
With the basic plan of city hall and the plaza sketched out, now come the finer details, like the face and materials of the building. People discussed ideas like mortise-and-tenon wood beams or the appearance of hand-crafted joints and custom steel brackets. "The language of steel and wood" was the phrase Meissner used to describe the building's faade, what he had earlier described as the Homer vernacular.
The next open house is 5:30-8:30 p.m. March 13 in the old Homer City Hall Cowles Council Chambers. Plans and other ideas are available at the Town Square Web site at www.hometownsquare.com.
Michael Armstrong can be reached at michael.armstrong@homernews.com.
