The City of Fairfield Building Task Force is actively evaluating the future of three city-owned buildings — the old fire station, city hall, and the Roosevelt Center — as the city prepares to move into its new fire station by the end of the year, according to comments during Monday’s city council meeting on July 27th.
Reinert said the primary focus of the task force right now is the old fire station, since the city currently occupies it and needs to decide what to do with it once the fire department moves into its new facility. A title search is underway to clarify ownership of the building, which preliminary documents suggest is owned 80 percent by the city and 20 percent by Jefferson County. The city is already in conversation with the county about the building’s future. “We’re actually talking to the county now, kind of getting some ideas of what they would like to see done with that building,” Reinert said. “Is it something the city can reuse? Maybe we should sell it? Does the county want it? All of those things.” A joint meeting with the county is expected once the situation gets closer to a resolution.
The second building under evaluation is city hall. Reinert said Melanie Carlson, Fairfield’s city engineer and public works director, has done significant work assessing the building. “Our city engineer has done a fantastic job evaluating city hall,” he said. “We understand that as the city grows, the demands for administration will also grow. That is why we’re looking for a planning and zoning director, because Melanie does all of those things and she can no longer juggle her personal life, and her task as an engineer, plus public works, plus planning and zoning, plus a whole bunch of other stuff.” Reinert said the city will need more office space to handle the growing workload. “We’re going to need more office spaces to handle this. That means we need to think about where those office spaces are in city hall because it’s just not big enough.”
The third building is the Roosevelt Center, which is attached to the Recreation Center. Reinert described it as a largely empty space that is not ADA accessible and is only used occasionally. “It’s used occasionally, but we don’t know what to do with it,” he said. “Are we going to turn it into something? Are we going to reimagine that space? I don’t know. So that is what this task force is looking into.” Boyer noted that the Roosevelt Center is an older school building and suggested the task force research whether historic building grants might be available to support a new purpose for the facility. “The Roosevelt Center is an old school building,” Boyer said. “Are there grants out there for that historic building that would make sense for that building and a new purpose? We haven’t gone down that road, but let’s just say it was thrown out as an idea and I think it’s a valid idea to search and research. We’ll know more soon.”
Reinert acknowledged that the underlying question running through all three discussions is the same — how does the city pay for what needs to be done. “And then of course, again with all of our aging infrastructure, I’m going to repeat this — how do we pay for these things?” Reinert said. “Our municipal budget basically does our day-to-day operations and we usually have a shoestring budget, and we get to have one or the other but we never get to have both. So where are we? Where do we want to go? And then how do we get there? Those are the things.” Boyer praised the work being done by the task force. “We’ve got smart people on the committee and they’re throwing out interesting ideas,” she said.
The task force will continue meeting and is expected to provide further updates to the council as discussions progress.
