Tosa council OKs design work on City Hall, library updates

An artist’s rendition shows what the new front of Wauwatosa City Hall and Library might look like as part of preliminary design work for a possible renovation and expansion of the facility.

Long-discussed plans to renovate and expand Wauwatosa’s aging City Hall and library building took a preliminary step forward this week when the city’s Common Council authorized up to $500,000 to begin designing what would be the building’s first major update in more than 30 years.

The final scope and details of such a project remain uncertain, particularly given the potential cost. Several council members, in their Tuesday evening meeting, acknowledged that the project, with a price tag as high as $75 million, might be a tough sell for some taxpayers.

The council, however, was unanimous in approving money from the city’s capital improvement budget to hire a construction manager to oversee the initial design work. Council members seemed in agreement that the existing 118,000-square-foot building, Tosa’s central civic campus, is in need of and overdue for an upgrade.

“There’s a tendency to kick the can down the road,” Alderperson Joe Phillips, District 6, said. “The costs don’t go away.”

Alderperson Amanda Fuerst, District 7, noted that Tosa’s City Hall complex had fallen behind those of other comparable cities. It was built in 1957 and first renovated in 1968. Its last renovation was in 1993.

Alderperson James Moldenhauer, District 1, called it “a tired building” that needs to be revamped.

How it should be revamped is a more challenging question. Several city administrators joined Tosa Library Director Peter Loeffel in a half-hour presentation that highlighted initial sketches and ideal features of what a potential building upgrade might look like.

View a city’s presentation on the municipal complex here.

View a feasibility study for the project here.

On the City Hall site of the project, Deputy City Administrator Melissa Weiss said officials hope renovations will include more meeting space, energy efficiency upgrades and a reconfigured layout that would be easier for citizens to navigate the space when visiting City Hall. She also said a modernization project would aid in employee morale and retention.

“This facility is starting to pose some challenges,” Weiss said.

Loeffel, in his presentation, ran through numerous potential improvements to the library side of the building, which he said would allow staff to expand the library’s services, make the space more accessible to all visitors and cater to the specific needs of certain groups of patrons, such as children and teens. Some of those changes would be as straightforward as lowering bookshelves from 7 feet to 5 1/2 feet, so the top shelves are easier to reach and to improve visibility. Other changes could include a new outdoor storytime space, “maker” space, an audio studio and a new teen library, in addition to the existing children’s and adult libraries.

Adding new meeting space also would be a major improvement, Loeffel said. Currently, the only large conference room in the library is the popular Firefly Room, which can accommodate 125 people. The next-largest conference rooms are only big enough for about a dozen people. This often results in small or midsize meetings and gatherings booking the Firefly Room, underscoring the need for more appropriately sized spaces. Loeffel estimated that 70-90% of meeting space bookings could be accommodated in smaller conference rooms with capacity of 30 people.

Other updates could include book lockers so that patrons could pick up their holds 24/7 outside the library, and he proposed replacing the current outdoor book drop with a new automated returns handler, which would streamline the library’s returns and reshelving process.

Another goal of the renovations would be to better integrate the library with City Hall, including by adding a new second-floor connection. That also could open up the library to street-side access from North Avenue, Loeffel said.

A key part of any proposed renovation of Wauwatosa’s municipal complex would be better integration of City Hall offices on one side and the library on the other, making it easier for the public to navigate the building.

Tosa officials have debated the future of the municipal complex at least as far back as 2015, when the council’s Financial Affairs Committee worked with consultants to begin assessing the building’s condition and identify the city’s options for the facility. In subsequent years, city leaders wrestled with the core question of whether to sell the property and build a new facility somewhere else in the city or to upgrade the existing facility at the corner of Wauwatos and North avenues.

By 2021, the Common Council had settled on the option of keeping the existing facility and began researching the city’s space needs for potential upgrades.

On Tuesday, Tosa Finance Director John Ruggini followed Loeffel’s presentation with a brief discussion of potential financial impact of those upgrades. With plans still in the preliminary phase, the $75 million figure is a rough estimate based on the kind of facility that would fully address the city’s needs, and Ruggini cautioned that a more precise estimate will depend on the council endorsing a more detailed design.

The $75 million estimate also includes contingency planning, and there may be ways of reducing costs when plans are finalized and construction gets underway. City leaders also expect to offset at least some of the cost through a fundraising campaign by the Wauwatosa Library Foundation, though the foundation has not yet set a goal for such a campaign.

The preliminary estimate was given in 2027 dollars, Ruggini said, in an attempt to anticipate rising construction costs by the time a project were to break ground. To explain what this would mean to individual taxpayers, Ruggini reviewed a slide that showed the differences between four hypothetical projects at four different costs.

If the city decides to spend $75 million on the facility upgrades, Ruggini estimated that the average Tosa homeowner (a home with an equalized value of $300,000) would pay an additional $201 a year for 20 years. At $65 million, that homeowner would pay $174 more a year, or $147 more for a $55 million project and $120 for a $45 million project.

View full video of the Common Council’s Tuesday meeting here.

Alderperson Margaret Arney, District 2, thanked the officials for their presentation while expressing concern about how successful the city might be in hitting its cost target.

“Overbudge is a serious concern,” Arney said. “You just don’t know what you’re dealing with until you’re dealing with it.”

Alderperson Sean Lowe, District 5, shared other members’ concerns about costs but suggested that delaying a decision could be even more costly. He spoke in favor of a $75 million project if that is what the city needs.

The cost is “going to get bigger and bigger the longer a project like this is delayed,” Lowe said. “That doesn’t do the residents any good at all.”

The council, which was meeting as a Committee of the Whole to receive the presentation, ended by approving the $500,000 for design work, but it declined for now to endorse any specific project proposal. Instead, it referred the matter to the Financial Affairs Committee for further discussion and possible action on the appropriate scope and cost of the renovations.

— David Paulsen is an East Tosa-based journalist and can be reached by email here.