City moves into new digs
The old building, which is still the police station, faces problems
matthew graham / oregon city news
The new Oregon City City Hall.
Leaving behind the cramped building at 320 Warner Milne Road, with trailers parked out back acting as workspaces, Oregon City employees on Tuesday moved into the renovated McLean Building at the top of Singer Hill.
Mayor Alice Norris said the move is the “most exciting thing to happen in Oregon City this year” and a turning point for the city.
“This is a huge positive step for the whole community,” she said. “Many people say that what a community thinks about itself shows in its city hall, so the city has raised the bar here.”
With police, the municipal court and code and parking enforcement staying at the old City Hall, the move will give city employees much more breathing room.
Norris also said the move adds to the city’s goal of sustainability.
“There’s nothing more sustainable than a recycled building,” she said. “And it’s so close to services that (employees) can do the ‘walk more, drive less’ mantra that we’ve been preaching.”
She also said it will better serve residents.
“And then for the public besides the money we’ve saved there and moving to a very revitalizing area – the lack of confidentially in the old lobby was very (problematic), so there’ll be no more babies and inmates in shackles commingling,” she said.
The city’s urban renewal commission bought the McLean Clinic last year for about $6.5 million and was budgeted to spend about $2.4 million renovating it for city use.
The McLean Clinic, at 406 7th St., was built in 1936 by Edward McLean, a local physician who helped found the Oregon City Hospital.
Problems for old building
With the move to the McLean Building, the plan was for the police department to take over the former City Hall. But with inadequate space for the future growth and substandard structural features for impending increased seismic standards, the city is looking at asking the voters for money to build a new facility.
“The space-needs projection showed the facility is critically undersized and lacks the most basic amenities of a modern police facility,” said a staff report on the issue.
The police department moved into the building in 1981 and the move was supposed to be temporary.
A state law will require all emergency facilities to meet seismic standards by 2022. The building doesn’t currently meet those and an upgrade to make it comply would cost more than $1 million and still not address the size issue of the facility.
“It seems to make sense to me that putting $1 million into this building doesn’t appear to be a good use of public funds because we haven’t begun to touch the redesign of it or making improvements to make it more efficient or addressing the critical space needs that need to be fixed,” Police Chief Mike Conrad said at a city work session last month.
The facility’s state is such that the police force won’t even be allowed to move into the portions vacated by other city departments that moved to the McLean Building unless seismic upgrades are done.
Conrad said that both the Citizens Advisory Committee and the police department advisory group recommended constructing a new facility rather than spending to renovate.
City Manager Larry Patterson agreed.
“To us it doesn’t make a lot of sense to invest in this building when it doesn’t meet the needs” of the force, he said at the work session.
And with general agreement from the city commission, city staff is expected to begin laying the groundwork for a 2011 bond campaign.
The city estimates the cost to put the bond on the ballot at around $35,000 with staff work, a phone survey and a project manager.