SILVERTON

Decision nears for Mt. Angel's aging City Hall

Christena Brooks
Special to the Appeal Tribune
Current Mt. Angel City Hall.

Eight years of on-again-off-again talks about Mt. Angel’s aging City Hall will culminate in a decision this summer to build, move, or stay, if the city council meets its goal on the subject for the fiscal year.

“There’s a feeling among councilors that we need to stop kicking the can down the road – and pick it up, or put it in the trash, or recycle it,” said City Manager Amber Mathiesen. “There’s a sense that it’s time to make a decision.”

Councilors’ interest in constructing a new City Hall, with an estimated price tag of $10 million back in 2017, has ebbed as they’ve lately favored the idea of finding and using existing buildings downtown. They’re exploring available and “potentially vacant” local properties to provide more room and an earthquake-resistant space for police officers, Mathiesen said.

“We can’t build our dream today,” she said. “Now we’re asking, ‘Can we modify our vision to fit something else?’”

Modifying the vision may mean stepping away from a set of rough plans, drawn up in 2017, for a new 12,000-square-foot City Hall housing all municipal services, including police, under one roof. Instead, the council may opt to move its police force only – and keep remaining staff members in 90-year-old City Hall.

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The 5,000-square-foot building, constructed in 1929, is made of hollow clay tiles that typically shatter in earthquakes. A seismic retrofit would be expensive and unjustifiable, MSC Engineering of Salem told the council several years ago. At the same time, there’s a deadline from the State of Oregon requiring all EMS personnel to work from seismically sound structures by 2022, “subject to available funding,” according to statute.

For six years, the state has aggressively funded seismic retrofits at schools and EMS buildings. Those grant dollars are for re-do’s only, with Mt. Angel leaders uncertain about whether they might buy an existing building and then apply for grant money to upgrade it for police use.

Whatever they discover, they are moving from talk to action as they tackle their own goal to decide by June.

In other community news:

Mt. Angel landed a $5,000 state grant via the “Healthy Eating Active Living” (HEAL) Cities Campaign to buy outdoor workout/play equipment and install it at Humpbert Park for people of all ages to enjoy. Originally seeking $15,000, the city will more fully fund the project using $5,000 grant from PepsiCo Inc., and some existing park funding, Mathiesen said.

Wurstfest, Mt. Angel’s Oktoberfest-style indoor winter celebration, will be March 1-3, and it has a new name: Volksfest. The change solves a legal clash with a trademarked Wurstfest in Texas and gives Mt. Angel a moniker generally celebrating “volk,” the German word for “people.” The event is also expanding from two days to three days.

Mt. Angel city councilors took a first step toward a strategic plan effort, a consultant-led process that would distill the community’s goals for itself. Not the familiar “comprehensive plan” or “master plan,” which focus on infrastructure goals, a strategic plan is “the softer side” of planning, with residents sharing livability goals and staff getting “measurable components” they can then report as “done or not done,” Mathiesen said.  With the council’s blessing, she will find and share consultant costs at the next meeting.