The Calimesa City Council this month unanimously approved spending up to $430,000 to convert a former bank building into a new city hall.
The council approved the purchase of the building last December, on the city’s 35th anniversary, in an effort to consolidate the city’s operations into a single civic building. But before that can happen, the former Bank of America Building at 1055 Calimesa Blvd. will need to undergo extensive renovations.
In January, the city released a request for proposals for architectural and engineering services for the renovation project and received 13 responses — two of which were selected for further evaluation.
“After the evaluation and interviews, we determined that Acton Architecture was the best fit based on their approach to adaptive reuse projects, coordination strategy and experience with civic facilities, including prior work in our city for the Calimesa [Branch] Library,” Mari Shakir, public works director, said at the April 6 meeting.
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According to the staff report, the selected firm emphasized collaboration with city staff and presented a “clear approach to early due diligence, programming and coordination intended to align project scope, schedule and budget prior to advancing into detailed design.”
As part of the proposal, the city approved a base fee of $390,393 with a 10% contingency of $39,039, bringing the total approved budget to $429,432 from the administrative facility fees fund.
The agreement supports the completion of the firm’s due diligence, programming, conceptual design, schematic design, design development, construction documents, bidding support and construction administration necessary for the project. It does not include the topographic survey at this time since the initial goal is to get the interior move-in ready for city staff, Shakir said.
“If we plan on doing exterior like landscape and parking lot improvements and sidewalk improvements, then we would need that,” Shakir said, noting that while the firm would provide a design for the exterior, the construction of that would likely be done in a future phase.
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This is just kicking the can down the road. A facility of this size will be obsolete as the city grows. It’s just another example of Calimesa City Council doing something on the cheap. And we already lost our bank branch. Will we lose the Drive-thru ATM machine(s) as well?