OCEANPORT — The Borough Council is soliciting advice from the community as the administration weighs options for the future location of Borough Hall.
According to Mayor Michael Mahon, an April 21 town hall meeting has been scheduled at Maple Place Middle School, where the five potential choices for a new municipal complex will be discussed.
“We can get direct information from the public at a session dedicated for that purpose, and we can flesh out some of these concepts,” Mahon said during the April 2 council meeting.
The former Borough Hall was heavily damaged by flooding from superstorm Sandy in October 2012, and departments were relocated. Administrative offices were moved to the Old Wharf House on East Main Street; the library was relocated to Oceanport Community Center; and the Police Department was relocated to the firehouse on Fort Monmouth.
The alternatives the council has been discussing include rebuilding Borough Hall at the current site on Monmouth Boulevard; relocating the offices to Maria Gatta Park on Port au Peck Avenue; occupying the Village Center plaza on East Main Street; or acquiring Russell Hall or vacant land at Fort Monmouth for the construction of the municipal center.
Mahon said the borough website will have information and renderings for each of the five sites in the weeks leading up to the meeting.
He said the current estimate for Borough Hall, including costs for acquisition, demolition, construction and retrofitting the fort building, would be approximately $10 million.
“These figures at this point aren’t just construction costs — it is what it would cost us in its entirety,” Mahon said.
One of the options the borough is weighing is whether the Police Department and/or library would be included in a centralized municipal complex.
In September, the Police Department moved to the former Fort Monmouth firehouse, a 6,089-square-foot, two-story facility in the Oceanport reuse area’s historic district.
The library, displaced by Sandy, moved to the Oceanport Community Center last August.
According to Mahon, the borough’s site selection committee has recommended that the library and Police Department be excluded from plans for a municipal complex. Andrew Trocchia, lead architect, also said he supports not including the Police Department or library in plans for the municipal offices.
“I think we are steering toward potentially not having all the departments in the building,” Trocchia said. “We’ve done several of these facilities, and your square-foot costs jump up pretty significantly from a municipal building that is just offices.
“A police facility where you have to have a retention cell, which is costly; security systems; and a lot of other things — that brings up the costs.”
Trocchia said the site selection committee conducted interviews with members of all borough departments to arrive at a size requirement for Borough Hall.
“With that information, we determined how big a building we needed to put on the site,” Trocchia said. “Based on those interviews, we determined we need approximately 22,500 square feet for a facility to house all of your departments, excluding your Public Works Department.”
One of the most important issues with all of the sites is the use of space.
Trocchia said a multipurpose room would be included and would serve as a courtroom, meeting room and emergency management command center that would have movable partitions.
“We are trying to really make the building a multipurpose facility,” he said, adding that the site selection committee made a list of the pros and cons for each of the five potential sites.
Factors that favor Maria Gatta Park include the redevelopment of the surrounding neighborhood, opportunities for recreation, the location along a main thoroughfare, and existing utilities on-site.
The park site would involve a land swap since the park is designated as open space. Another concern is that the offices would generate increased traffic on Port au Peck Avenue.
Another site being considered is the Village Center retail plaza on East Main Street, a three-story structure with retail spaces at street level.
If the borough were to acquire the plaza site, Trocchia said it would provide benefits such as rehabilitating the plaza as a mixeduse building that would also generate rental revenues for the borough.
However, he said the drawbacks include the borough becoming a landlord, access issues and a shortage of parking spaces.
Trocchia said both sites on Fort Monmouth would allow new construction with design flexibility and proximity to the Police Department.
However, the fort site is less visible and would involve higher costs to update utilities.
He said the problems incurred by remaining at the current Borough Hall site are obvious.
“I think we all know the conditions we’ve suffered there,” Trocchia said. “We can build a building there that meets flood regulations that would be high and dry, but if you have another flood situation you aren’t going to [have access].”
The benefits include no acquisition costs and a site that is familiar to residents.
If the decision is made not to keep Borough Hall at the Monmouth Boulevard site, the property could be sold and the proceeds would offset some of the costs of the new municipal center.
Mahon said the current Borough Hall site would be included in a redevelopment study to determine whether it qualifies as an area in need of redevelopment.
During the meeting, the Borough Council also amended the capital budget to include $1.2 million that could be used to purchase Russell Hall.
Mahon said responses to the request for offers to purchase Russell Hall are due April 13 to the Fort Monmouth Economic Redevelopment Authority. That deadline made it necessary to amend the capital budget for 2015 to include funding for the potential acquisition.
The $1.2 million represents the upper limit of what the borough would be willing to bid for acquisition of a building, Mahon said.