By Jennifer Jacob Brown

jjacob@themeridianstar.com



When city officials in Meridian first began to contemplate renovations to City Hall around 2003, they had yet to realize what a costly and time consuming project they were getting into.

What began as a simple look at the heating and air conditioning systems in the building ballooned into a years-long, multi-million dollar, full-scale historically accurate renovation of a nearly 100 year old building.



Bumps in the road



It started, Meridian Mayor John Robert Smith said, with city workers “literally getting sick at their desks” because of faulty HVAC systems. In 2003, workers had had enough, and consultants were hired to look into the repair of the heating and air conditioning, Meridian’s Finance and Records Director Ed Skipper said.

That opened up a whole can of worms.

Skipper said the consultants found so many other problems, such as a roof that needed replacing, that the city decided on a total redo. $10 million in general obligation bonds were issued for the renovation of City Hall along with several smaller projects, including the construction of a new fire station.

“If you’re going to spend that kind of money,” Skipper said, “you need to do it right.”

Once work started, one problem followed another, and now Smith and Skipper estimate the project will ultimately cost between $14 million and $15 million and that it will take another two years to complete.

“There were a lot of things that you didn’t know because you uncovered things with the building,” Skipper said.

The project has been split into four phases: Phase I was planning. Phase II was selective demolition. Phase III, currently underway, is exterior renovation. Phase IV will be the interior renovation.

With phase III winding up, Skipper estimates the city will have spent roughly $7 million on the renovation once the phase is completed around this May. In 2003, that was more than the city expected to spend on the entire completed project.

So what happened? Smith and Skipper say a combination of factors caused the cost to skyrocket and the time frame to keep extending.

For one thing, workers discovered additional problems with the building when they began demolition. Over the years, parts of the building’s basic structure had rotted — rust had destroyed iron rods so fully that they were barely larger than nails.

Some of the damage was caused by previous work on the building. As Skipper put it, “under the guise of maintenance things were done that should never have been done to that building.” Half a marble staircase was ripped out to make way for an elevator, fancy finishes were slathered with lurid blue paint, and the first floor was bricked up for protection from feared Soviet attacks.

One particularly time consuming problem — damage to the terra cotta tiles which cover most of the building’s exterior. The tiles were painted over decades ago, trapping moisture inside and causing the tiles to rot. More than 1,500 individual tiles have had to be reproduced with precise accuracy.

An increase in the cost of building also drove up the price tag, Smith and Skipper said. A rise in construction costs in this area after Hurricane Katrina and in the cost of building materials globally because of a construction surge in China have contributed to the higher-than-expected cost of renovating City Hall.

Another cost increasing factor — the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Because City Hall, which was built in 1915, is on the National Register of Historic Places, Archives and History can dictate certain aspects of the renovation, Skipper said. He said that, in some cases, Archives and History has required the city to spend more money than they had planned for the sake of historic accuracy.

He gave one example: the city, he said, had initially wanted to use relatively cheap windows painted to look like their 1915 counterparts — but Archives and History decreed that the city must purchase more expensive mahogany windows.

Those factors, Skipper said, made what the city thought would be a $5 million to $6 million project into a $14 million to $15 million one.

Phase IV will be particularly expensive since the interior is full of things like marble, scagliola (a form of faux marble that is even more expensive than real marble), and other pricey materials and finishes.

However, the city is hoping that the current economy will help them get a better deal on phase IV than they did on phase III. When phase III began, construction work was especially pricey — but now that the housing slump has contractors competing more heavily for work, the city expects better bids on phase IV, Smith and Skipper said. Phase III only had two bids.

“We paid a premium for phase III. Hopefully we’ll make that up for phase IV,” Skipper said. “In this environment we’re in now, we should get some good competitive bids.”



How the project is financed



The City Hall renovation is being financed through general obligation bonds, with different financing for each phase.

General obligation bonds, or GO bonds, are municipal bonds used by cities and towns to finance everything from police stations to parks.

“All cities that I know of have GO bonds,” Skipper said. “That never goes away because you never stop having to build things or replace things… You pay them off and then you issue out debt as you need it for specific projects.”

A city’s GO debt is paid back through tax revenue. There is a specific tax millage for GO debt, and the millage amount floats. There is a maximum on how much GO debt a city can issue based on the city’s assessed property values.

Skipper said the city tries to make the paying back of GO debt as painless as possible for taxpayers. “We try to schedule our debt so you don’t have a huge increase,” he said.

Each phase of construction is bid separately. The city council sold $10 million in bonds in 2006, which have covered the first three phases of construction. The council recently declared its intent to issue up to $10 million more in bonds to cover the cost of phase IV.

Skipper said that “hopefully” the city will not have to use the entire $10 million by the end of the project, but that there is no way to say for sure how much will be used until bids for phase IV come in. Bids are due in early April, and are expected to be presented to the council later in April, Smith said.

City administration is looking at the possibility of offsetting some of the cost of phase IV with $330,000 in energy block grants that are expected to come to Meridian as part of the American Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act (stimulus plan). They want to use that money for the installation of energy efficient equipment in the building, but do not know yet whether that use of the funds will be approved by the federal government.

In Phase II, roughly $463,000 was spent, Skipper said. Phase III has been contracted for around $6.6 million, and the city expects to have spent roughly $7 million on the project altogether by the end of phase III.

Skipper said he did not have an estimate on the cost of phase I, which was the design phase, because later design costs have been lumped in with the costs of phase I. He said $500,000 or so has been spent on design altogether.

Skipper and Smith are currently estimating that the project will have cost the city $14 million to $15 million by the time of its completion, but cannot be fully confident in their estimates until phase IV bids come in.

The city must wait for City Hall to be completed before starting work on the proposed new police station, because the temporary city hall is on the new police station site. Smith said work on the final phase should begin in May or June of this year and could take around two years to complete.



What the money is buying



The century-old City Hall is getting an extraordinary facelift. Right now, the building is gutted out and blemished with scaffolding and plywood, but once the renovation is complete, it will look like the 15 million bucks that went into it. And according to one Archives and History representative, Meridian City Hall will be one of the most important large-scale historic renovations in Mississippi because the building will still be used for its original purpose.

Because it will be retrofitted with energy efficient gear ranging from CFL light bulbs to light sensitive window shades, City Hall will also be one of the greenest (if not the greenest) buildings in Meridian.

The mayor and other city officials hope that, in concert with the MSU-Riley Center and the renovated Threefoot building, City Hall will make Meridian a kind of tourist destination for admirers of historic architecture. Tentative plans have been made to connect the three buildings with a landscaped park.

There are many who feel the renovation is too big and too expensive, but to Ed Skipper, it’s money well-spent.

“To me it’ll be worth the effort and the cost,” he said, “because hopefully it’ll last another hundred years.”

City Hall Renovation

Phase by Phase



Phase I – planning; no cost estimate available.

Phase II – selective demolition; roughly $463,000 was spent on this phase.

Phase III – exterior renovation, installation of fire stairs and elevator structure on the interior; this phase, which is currently under way, was contracted for just over $6.5 million

Phase IV – interior renovation and basic landscaping. The cost of this phase has not yet been determined.



(Source: Meridian Finance and Records Director Ed Skipper)