OK, city hall has been demolished.
I have said before that I am personally for the ball park, just not on top of the old city hall and children’s museum.
Now that the building is gone, let’s try to figure out what this has cost us. I don’t have all of the numbers, they will come out over a period of time. I can assure you that they will be higher than what I can identify at this point.
Let’s start with the city hall building. The central appraisal district put the value at over $30 million. City council paid for an independent appraisal that came in at a little over $13 million. For the sake of discussion let’s use the lower number.
Then we have the land. The site is 5.5 acres. With 43,560 square feet per acre we end up with 239,580 square feet. What is the land worth? We don’t have to guess here, the city has already told us. In Train wreck we saw the city paying $27.50 per foot to the railroad for 8,684 square feet of land on the same site. That comes to $6.6 million.
The city tells us that they will spend $50 million building the new ball park, but Muckraker pointed out in No one will notice that the city is selling $51.4 million in bonds.
We had to cut a deal with the railroad to close 16 rail crossings throughout town. I won’t count this because the decreased value of the property is coming directly out of the adjacent property owner’s pockets and we will not be taxed for it.
The city had to buy air space over the depressed train way. Also, the quality of life bonds included $500,000 for a “convention center north pedestrian pathway”. North from the convention center takes you to only one place, the ball park. The water utility is paying separately to redo the water and sewer facilities serving the new ball park. Engineering and traffic studies have been conducted relative to the impact of tearing down city hall and operating a ball park. Power and communication lines are having to be moved. I will include none of these numbers in the total right now and will wait for the records to become available.
Then we chose to get new facilities for the city staff. The city told us that it would cost about $33 million. In $63.9 million and climbing we saw the totals that were available at that point.
So far then, we have:
Value of old city hall building $13.1 million
Value of city hall land $ 6.6 million
Construction bonds $51.4 million
Replace city hall $63.9 million
Total known at this point $135.0 million
As you will recall this number is low in that we do not have all of the individual contracts yet and we are not including interest.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
lt’s only because l’m a fan of this blog, that l’m going to pretend l didn’t hear you type that you wanted a ballpark. l do remember at least 6 months ago that we were told that in order for all of this “progress” to come to fruition, that it would only cost us 130 large. (stadium = 50, purchasing + moving into a new miniature City Hall(s) = 68-69, and some new parking facility thing-y = 11-12) Ah yes, dems were the good ol’ days!
We deserve better. (especially me)
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