The City of Watertown officially opens the doors of the new City Hall to the public. Officials hope the improvements will ripple throughout the community.
It replaces a building city leaders said had “numerous deficiencies” including ADA limitations, plumbing and electrical issues.
The project has been five years in the making, but discussions of building a new city hall date even before then.
Kyle Peters is the Deputy Mayor. At a ribbon cutting, he said when he came to the area five years ago he saw the old city hall and didn’t feel like it fit the city.
“And I’m looking at it and I’m like ‘That is not a good representation of what Watertown is,” Peters said. “We’ve got beautiful buildings downtown, and we’ve got a lot of going for us. We can do better than this.’”
In 2021, Watertown officially purchased a Wells Fargo building with the intent to build a new city hall.
Peters said that gave the city advantages over other options.
“We own the building, so we could really cut down the timeline of getting something done,” Peters said.
Construction wrapped up this May, and employees began working in the new building in June.
Alan Stager is the Watertown City Manager. He said what a city hall looks like is important.
“In this building our public brings us our greatest challenges and dreams, and we help make them happen,” Stager said.
He called it an upgrade for both the city employees and residents.
“And in our prior building it was tough to collaborate. It was tough to see where other departments were and what they were doing and who was out in the field looking at a project or who was in the office or in a conference,” Stager said. “But this building is designed and laid out for collaboration. We have offices around the perimeter of the building, we have conference rooms at every corner and the center of the building is filled with that makes things happen for all of you.”
City Hall includes a new main building and city council chambers. Construction manager Huff Construction also renovated the “drive-up” area of Wells Fargo into a garage to park city vehicles.
The city spent a little over $4 million on renovation costs. With furniture, signage and IT equipment, the total is projected over $5.3 million and is paid for with money from Watertown’s Capital Improvement fund.
According to KXLG Watertown, plans are in place to turn the old city hall building into a hotel.
