Inside the New Government Center

In January, fighting Columbia’s City Hall will no longer mean waiting in line or taking a small, rickety elevator up four floors to the Council chambers to participate in a public hearing.

Meeting your council representative will no longer mean driving to a local café for Saturday office hours.

The new City Council chambers will be on the first floor of the City Hall extension, just past the City Council offices and the conference room where the city manager will hold his televised media briefings.

Later in the year, getting the paperwork needed to open, build or expand a business space won’t mean hiking around downtown. (For example, meeting with public works surveyors on Ash Street, members of planning and zoning at City Hall and staff from water and light at the old Williams-Keepers building on the west side of Providence Road.)

By the end of the year, when workers finish renovating the original City Hall building and municipal employees move out of their transitional space, business people will only need to walk into the government center to start and complete the process.

For city staff, coordinating projects across departments will no longer require walking to another building several blocks away to see a supervisor.

When the upper floors of the new building open in March, staff members will be able to walk across the hall to meet with their supervisors.

The construction of the $23 million government center, funded through special obligation bonds that didn’t require voter approval, began in May 2008.

As the offices start to open, the designers of the new space say communication and efficiency will improve. Government services will be more accessible.

The design and placement of the new Council chambers was one of the big steps to doing this, Assistant City Manager Tony St. Romaine said.

“City Council meetings are usually well attended,” St. Romaine said. “Sometimes there are over a hundred people.”

The process of improving accessibility goes back farther, when the city moved utility customer services to the renovated first floor of the Daniel Boone Building and installed a drive-through payment window. The customer services operation will remain open during the renovations of the upper floors.

St. Romaine said the project began with the goal of having a new space that made it easier for Columbia residents to interact with city government and for city workers to interact with one other.

By next year, 80 percent of municipal employees will work in cubicles, and only department heads and managers of specific divisions will have individual offices.

“It creates that open and adjacent environment that is needed to communicate with other employees,” St. Romaine said. “You don’t always get that when everyone is in an individual office, so having this open environment will lend itself to more communication.”

Chiodini Associates, the project’s architect, designed a building layout to increase efficiency now and during the next two decades.

“We had (Chiodini) actually complete a space study before we began work that looked at our long-term space needs for all our administrative operations in the downtown area,” St. Romaine said. “They especially took a look at all the working relationships and adjacencies that were needed between departments, and we worked to put those departments that needed to work on a daily basis in close proximity to each other.”

Specifically the city will relocate the water and light, public works, planning and the finance departments to floors three through five in the new building. Public works will be on the third floors of both the old and new structures, water and light on the fourth floors of both buildings, finance on the fifth floor of the new building and planning on the fifth floor of the old building.

“When you talk about a developer who comes and wants to get plans approved for a redevelopment area, or maybe just a change to one of their existing facilities, the whole process requires review by so many departments,” St. Romaine said. “Just having those departments located next to each other will create the adjacencies needed for good communication, and when the developers come in, they won’t have to go to multiple buildings downtown to get the answers they need.”

Both public works and the finance department have had supervisors in one location and members of their staff in other buildings downtown, which will change when the government center is completed.

“It is hard as a director to supervise people who aren’t close by,” St. Romaine said.

First Floor

Council “office hours” move to City Hall

Council members will have office space for the first time in City Hall. The space doesn’t provide for individual offices but does give members a place meet with constituents and others involved with city issues. Assistant City Manager Tony St. Romaine said the first-floor placement will make it easier to keep the building secure because council members will be able to hold office hours on the weekend, and upper floors can remain closed.

In the spotlight

The southern conference room will be equipped with the lighting and plug-ins needed for the city’s cable channel cameras. The cable channel will use the room to broadcast the city manager’s news conferences, which were previously held in Council chambers, and to conduct interviews for stories they produce. The space also can be used as a makeshift studio.

Surfin’ the net during the boring parts

During meetings, council members’ laptop computers will be wired into the new government center IT system that will let them view presentations shown on the six screens in the new space. The Daniel Boone Building has no wireless Internet access, but there will be Wi-Fi connections on new first floor of the new building.

Musical chairs, anyone?

The seating in the new chambers won’t be fixed like it currently is. The ability to reconfigure the space means the room can be used for multiple functions, such as training sessions, public forums with multiple parties and roundtable discussions.

Second Floor

Who gets the biggest offices with the best views?

With more space and windows with views of Broadway, the city manager’s and the mayor’s offices on the second floor are two pieces of prime real estate in the new building. Although other directors — such the public works director, water and light director and finance director — have front corner offices, too, they don’t quite measure up to the main offices on the second floor. The city manager and mayor both have offices that measure 320 square feet, while the director of finance has a 280-square-foot office, and the directors of public works and water and light have 250-square-foot offices. Of course, they all have corner offices with the best views on their floors.

Basement

So who’s stuck in the windowless basement?

Although the basement will house IT training rooms and space for the city cable channel, all employees might have a reason to frequent the darkest corners of City Hall. Once everyone is moved into their final spots at the end of 2010, the city wants to convert part of the basement into a workout area for city employees.