Toward a new City Hall: The numbers revealed
Turns out, the value of a new City Hall depends entirely on when you’re making the evaluation. Five years from now? It would be cheaper to stay put and make minimal changes to the current City Hall building. Ten years from now? Maybe we wish we’d built something new. Fifteen years from now? Building a new City Hall would start to save bundles of money. And fifty years out, the savings grow to $232 million in today’s dollars.
That’s the assessment from Jones Lang LaSalle, an accounting firm whose second, revised report (PDF), was released today. The firm found that the City Hall proposal from Gerding Edlen, which would build a large building on the site of the current Civic Plaza, plus develop nearby blocks as housing which the it would lease from the city, becomes more economical in the long term. Members of the public interested in more than just a summary can attend a public hearing in which Jones Lang and LaSalle will go through their presentation at 401 B st., fourth floor, tomorrow night at 6 p.m.
Here some key numbers from the report:
| Option | Cost at 10 years | Cost at 15 years | Cost at 50 years |
| Gerding Edlen Proposal | $226 million | $358.7 million | $558 million |
| Minimal Improvements Option | $178.3 | $377.8 | $790.4 |
| Net cost or savings to city (savings in parens) | $47.7 | ($19.1) | ($232.4) |
Crucial to understanding the minimal improvements option, though, is the fact that Jones Lang LaSalle assumes that after five years, the city will have to go through the selection process again to find a new developer and still build a new city hall. Their evaluation builds this idea into the long term cost of doing “nothing”.
“It would cost $93 million in repairs to keep the current building running for another 30 years,” said Jeff Graham, the project manager for the Centre City Development Corporation on this project. “That’s the same cost as building something new.”
Graham cited the earlier report (PDF) from accounting firm Ernst & Young, which found that the current City Hall is dilapidated and even most of the renovation options would not serve the city’s needs in the long run. JLL also emphasized that these figures are very fluid. The next step would be for the mayor and City Council to enter into an Exclusive Negotiating Agreement with Gerding Edlen in which the two sides would work out details on price and risk management.
