The Committee of the Whole met on Monday, February 23, 2026 at 6:00 p.m. in the City Hall Auditorium to discuss City Hall space options and multiple bond ordinances. The main focus was a presentation by Assistant Director Boss comparing two primary alternatives (Option 2 – renovate/add at current City Hall, and Option 3 – relocate administrative functions to the former Board of Education building at 1470 Warren Road). Following extensive deliberation, the committee advanced several bond ordinances to full council, but removed $16.5 million from Ordinance 07-2026 (facilities improvement notes) pending further direction on the City Hall relocation decision.
All right, we will call committee of the whole to order. First, I will move to approve the minutes of the February 9th Community of the Whole without necessity of reading. Second. Motion has been made and seconded. Any discussion? Hearing none. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. And that motion passes. Okay. So tonight, um, our main objectives uh for this evening, we have all of the uh bond notes legislation. Um that you know the finance department in our bond council has um asked the uh whichever whatever we're adopting, then we get it done by the next full council meeting, which is uh our next meeting in March, which means we need to get it out of committee of the whole uh tonight. So that's our main uh work tonight. So on the docket we have all of the bond legislation. Um and then we also uh will be getting a presentation um planning, obviously. Uh so what I want to make sure we do is save some time. Um director Boss, how long do you think your presentation is? Uh I'm gonna try to keep it at like 10, 15 minutes or less. Okay, that's great. Okay, so that that'll give us time um deliberate about the ordinances as well as um if anyone has questions about any of the other bonds uh ordinances besides the city hall stuff. Okay, so with that, I will turn it over, I'm assuming, to the director boss. Madam President, members of the council, thank you again. Allow me to come uh for you and walk you through what I've got and what you've got in front of you is really just um slides 13, 14, and 15. Um that if it's okay, I'm just gonna jump to here. So if you remember from last time we left off at this slide, this slide twelve. It's just kind of the basic analysis of alternatives, eliminating status quo option one and option three with the community health center. Um so it really leaves us down to uh option two and option three. So what I wanted to do was hopefully just recap some things, provide some additional perspective, um, and then stop talking and let answer questions and and and further deliberate. Um again, this is a broad, high-level scope kind of view at it, and it's really it's a view to what's the end? What's the end state that we're shooting towards? There are lots of ways that you can get here and we can talk about all those different ways of getting here, but ultimately what is the end state that that we're working towards? Um slide 13. And I'll just go kind of top to bottom down here. Um I wanted to provide you the hard copies there because I know they can be hard to see on the screen. Um so as we as we reviewed last week for priority one, which is providing the police and courts the increase of renovated space to meet their needs, both options work. Um I think w one of the few uh the only change to the previous slides that I made was on the assumptions, and I added another assumption just based on our discussion last time and and uh further thought was that we talked about and I wanted to assume just in planning that the council offices currently on the first floor in that lobby, they they do need to move in order to create the space for that lobby. Now they can stay in this building, they could move to another building. That's all part of the plan, the planning process, but I I added that to an assumption. Um but for priority two, looking at that, you know, while achieving party one consolidating and improving the functionality of the administrative departments. I'll just walk down kind of through the criteria there from top to bottom. Um so we talked about departmental location and functional space. Um and I know that there's concern about the additional space in the Board of Ed building under option three versus the kind of flex space under option two. Um that that additional space, that flexibility, I view that as an advantage of that option. There are and there will be, regardless of the direction that you go, you know, the Weber Murphy Fox uh space study, it was a snapshot in time. So any design effort, once you actually get into the detailed architectural design effort of trying to determine space requirements and things, you need that inherent flexibility and adaptability to go back through each department, talk to the new people. Some departments have gotten bigger, like ours, some departments have stayed the same. But it's going to be an another rebaseline of functional space requirements. Now, in the assumption I provided kind of that minimum for the administration of just to allow us to kind of objectively look at each of these options. So but that may be that may flex up, it may flex down.