(Arnolds Park)– The Arnolds Park City Council Wednesday evening approved a site plan for a new facility housing city offices, library, police department and fire station. City Councilman Mitch Watters serves on a committee that’s been looking at possible options. He says they settled on all new construction on the site of the existing city offices and expanding to the east on three lots the city purchased recently…
“We’ve done a bunch of research. We’ve had engineers come in and look at the existing structure that we have right now. All their estimates are saying that it would be way too much money spent to try to retrofit this building to bring it up to code and to do what we want to do and get the extra room that we need for future expansion.”
Watters says the city has simply outgrown the present facility. He says the new one is being designed with functionality in mind…
“The library will be moved up towards Highway 71; the city council meeting room in the center of the new building; city offices will have a lobby that we can lock down, it will be more secure; the police department and fire department will be all in one building but it will be built in two phases: the police department and fire department will be built and then what we want to do is build city hall after because we have to find home for the library, the city hall staff, the police department, while we’re doing all of this building.”
Watters says now that they have a site plan, more detailed plans can be put together, along with a cost estimate. He says the majority of funding for the project will come from motel/hotel tax revenue and tax increment financing. Watters adds a timeframe for the project also has not yet been identified…
“A lot of this is going to depend on the engineering and getting a construction manager hired and then deciding when we want to go with this.”
Watters says the final site plan they’ve decided on marks the culmination of a lot of work by the committee…
“We have looked at numerous design plans. Anything from offsite buildings to two story construction, putting the police department on top or the library up on top on the second floor. We’ve done different layouts of where the building would look right on this, you know, property that we have because we’re not able to, the price of property in the lakes area is just astronomical. We’re trying to be good stewards of the taxpayers.”
The city council also Wednesday voted to hire what’s known as a “Construction Manager at Risk” to assist in putting more detailed plans together.
