Since 1930, the Topeka City Hall building has never changed. However, that could be a different story moving forward.

“It’s time, it needs to be updated for a variety of reasons,” Councilwoman Karen Hiller said.

In 2017, the Topeka City council approved a project to renovate city hall with a total budget of $8.2 million. Now, they’re learning the construction team needs to double that budget to a total of $17 million.

“They said it was going to come in over, I thought around 2 maybe, so I was surprised to see 8.9,” Hiller said.

According to the city council agenda, the major price tag comes mostly from wanting to move the municipal court to the basement of city hall and renovating the city council chambers to add more seating and “a more stately appearance and flow.”

But now the questions becomes where does the additional $8.9 million come from?
 
“We have a wonderful building, and it would be wonderful to have it refreshed, but what’s the pay off, whats the timing how do we figure that out?”

The original $8 million budgeted for the improvements comes from the Capital Improvement Plan which is $9 million a year.

“If it’s to come out of the capital improvement program, it becomes a what do we not do?” Hiller said.

Now, the council did not vote on changing the amount budgeted Tuesday night, they just talked about the additional money that was being asked for nearly 3 hours.

Hot button topics tossed around at the meeting were:

• $2.6 million has already been spent on the renovation from design plans and a new cooling system that was bought.
• Ideas of going to a new building completely because some council members believe $17 million is just too much to renovate an old building.
• Some council members noted that with that idea, a loss of history and identity of city government being downtown would be lost.
• The design and construction team pointed out several plumbing concerns and problems in the walls of the building, but show how strong the structure of the building is.

Council did unofficially decide they would not approve the extra money. Several council members said they get too many calls from community members about fixing things like our roads, that $17 million is simply just too much.

They asked the construction team to post their plan online so you can give feedback. Once they post that, we will post a link for you.