I’ve been wondering about the salvage process down at the city hall rubble site. Could we have done better?
Mentions were made in the newspaper that doors and other things were being saved.
I drove by the site the other day and saw that some of the air conditioning equipment had been removed before the implosion. That is good if we somehow saved some money considering the cost of the chiller — $677,000 (see Why rig a bid when you can fool city council?).
It was a shame that we could not do something with the five year old radio system that city staff was going to be imploded with the building (see City Hall Relocation). Donating or selling it to another city would have been nice. We ended up spending $20 million for a new system. Moving the old one while keeping police and fire running was evidently too hard.
I suspect that we lost significant value because of the haste in getting out of the building and preparing the way for construction of the new ball park. Think of what one extra month would have allowed us to salvage.
The contract for demolition of the building was a private one between the ball park construction company and the demolition company, so we may never know who if anyone profited from any salvage taken out of city hall.
I don’t bring this up with the claim of any wrong-doing. I do think it would have been better if the ball park steam roller had gotten into action one month earlier. We could have saved money. We now know that it was under consideration for years before it became public. Thinking about it now we could even have saved city hall by putting the ball park somewhere else downtown.
Haste makes waste.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
Interesting that you point out another “private deal” on the demolition…obviously they think the more they can keep us in the dark, the better. Speaking about saving money, the whole deal with changing to a 4 day work schedule was to “save money” on city hall energy expenses, wasn’t it? So now that the energy inefficient building is demolished, how are they justifying sticking to the 4 day schedule? Where are the so called savings???
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Very good point. I bet our privileged govt employees never again work a 5 day week, especially during the summer and as long as they are under the current management.
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I know that there was an effort to salvage modular furniture, equipment etc. They refused. Isn’t this the progressive “green” crowd? So much for environmental green. It’s the green of greed!
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